


Halfway to Gallifrey

by riotcow



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, Jealousy, Marriage, Piercing, Pregnancy, Psychic Sex, Rough Sex, This is a cheesy bodice ripper dressed up as serious DW erotica and I admit it, Wedding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-28
Updated: 2014-08-28
Packaged: 2018-02-15 04:30:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 54,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2215881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riotcow/pseuds/riotcow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A somewhat pervy smut-ridden fix-it fic, post-TNotD, goes grossly AU from there. Clara's sacrifices on Trenzalore have changed her, and the Doctor isn't sure that he understands how. He's determined to do anything to help her, but the new Clara is throwing him for a loop, and the thing between them is growing out of control. This is a slowly unfolding romance with some increasingly D/s-style smut and lots of angst along the way. Upon editing, this is not a great fic… 11 is pretty OOC in parts. But I know there's not a ton of decent Whouffle out there, so I'll leave it up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was previously posted to fanfiction.net (before I discovered AO3), where it's been left abandoned a couple of chapters before the climax for over half a year. If you were following it there, you should be forewarned that I've actually decided to reconstitute it rather than finish it. The story had a natural ending around chapter 19 that I ignored, after which the whole thing got out of my hands and then floundered. (If you're mad at me for abandoning it, the major factor was actually a personal crisis; the writing problems just made it hard to get back to.)
> 
> I've finally decided that rather than forcing it, I'm going to end it where I should have (I'll probably write a new final chapter or epilogue to wrap it up) and use some of the other material elsewhere.

The Doctor didn't expect that, when she finally woke up, the first thing that Clara would do was ask to be taken home.

But then, to be fair - and he hated being fair - he'd had no idea what to expect at all. He hadn't  _expected_  Clara to hurl herself into his timestream on Trenzalore. By the time it had happened, he'd been too wrecked by the effects of being inside of his own grave to put up more than the most feeble protest. The Doctor was not proud, looking back. But he'd somehow, miraculously managed to return the favor… he had rescued her back. And in doing so, in tearing her away from his one hidden face, he'd realized just how much Clara must have seen that he'd never wanted to be seen.

She'd collapsed in his arms, and he'd carried her unconscious form back to the TARDIS, with Vastra and Jenny and Strax in tow. He didn't bother to explain to them what had happened inside of his timestream, nor his fears for when Clara awakened. Would she have been… changed, by the enormity of what had happened to her? By all that she'd experienced, all she'd learned? How could she not be?

And yet, and yet, his worst fear of all was, of course, that she wouldn't awaken at all. Vastra and Jenny, being women, had surmised the depth of his alarm in spite of his tight-lipped silence, and had reassured him of how incredibly strong Clara had proven herself to be. It wasn't really what he needed to hear - he knew damn well how strong Clara Oswald was - but he'd appreciated their kindness even so.

So he'd tucked Clara in in her barely-used quarters, absently noting in passing that they were less girlish than he'd expected. Clara had been just this side of girlhood when he'd found her, but she'd grown through their adventures. He pulled the burgundy duvet up under her chin, left a glass of water on her nightstand, ruefully recalling the first time that he'd tucked Clara into her bed, minutes after finding her. Keeping his impatience in check, he'd darted back to the console room to deliver the rest of his friends back to their own time so that he could get back to Clara's side as quickly as possible.

When she didn't wake after a couple of days, he permitted himself to putter about and occupy himself as long as he stayed within earshot of his unconscious companion. It gave him plenty of time to stew in his fears and his fantasies, and he returned to her often to watch her rest, his brow furrowed. Why was she still unconscious? What was going on in her mind? Was she having difficulty coming to terms with, what, thousands of years worth of muddled memories slamming into her human brain in a matter of moments? He'd been sorely tempted, but he didn't dare try to touch her mind in this state. He could easily have made matters worse, as he didn't know what was going on.

The timelessness of the TARDIS floating inside of the time vortex kept her from wasting, but after a week of relative time, he was in a fever pitch of concern. The TARDIS herself was clearly ready for Clara to wake up just so the Doctor would stop fiddling nervously with sensitive systems.

Fortunately he was beside her when she finally stirred - curled in on himself instead of his usual splay, nominally reading some great works of literature from the Junjun Transparency but really just worrying some more for her mind. He leaned forward anxiously, reminding himself not to wring his hands or otherwise let her see his fear. He watched her eyelids flutter, her lips part, her hand twitch atop the duvet.

"Come on, Clara. You can do it," he whispered, barely audible, watching her struggle to the surface.

Her eyes opened briefly, closed, fluttered again. He schooled himself to stillness, to silence. She would need calm when she awoke, he was pretty sure of that.

Finally, finally, it must have been days or weeks or maybe years, but finally she opened her eyes, slowly.

He couldn't help himself, he reached out and took her hand.

And she snatched it away.

The Doctor swallowed, hard. Clara was looking at him now, but her eyes were having a hard time focusing. She looked confused.

"Where…?" she finally uttered weakly.

"You're on board the TARDIS, Clara. I brought you here to recover. You've been sleeping for some time." He kept his voice soft, reigning in his exuberance at hearing a sensible word from her.

Her eyes traveled around the room slowly as if seeing it for the first time. She wasn't really looking at him, and he couldn't read her at all.

Her silence unnerved him, and he finally had to ask. "Do you remember what happened, Clara?"

Her response was just a short nod, still no eye contact. She appeared to be examining the various images and objects that she'd hung about the room, mostly those that she'd picked up on their travels that were too exotic to take into the Maitland's home.

He made himself wait. Waiting was not his strong suit. It didn't matter. After what Clara had done, he'd make himself sit in this chair for a millennium if that was what she needed from him.

Eventually she turned her head toward him, though her eyes fell first on his bowtie, then his hands, which were folded, white-knuckled, in his lap.

"Can I go home?" she asked.

The Doctor sat back, poleaxed. He… he realized how badly he needed to talk to her. No. To have her talk to him. To find out what was happening inside her in the aftermath of her ordeal. What she'd seen in there. He'd assumed, stupidly assumed that of  _course_ that was what would happen next after she awoke. That they would sit for hours, for days, as long as Clara needed - he was going to take her to the Privacy Pods of Xine, which would have divined and provided the most soothing setting possible for Clara and met their every physical need with no chance of being overheard or observed. If she had wanted. Or anywhere she wanted, as long as they could talk.

Apparently she didn't want to talk.

"Well… you mean now? As in, right away?" he stammered, inelegantly.

She just nodded, still no change in expression. She wanted to go home, right now.

He couldn't let her go, but how could he possibly say no to whatever she said she wanted?

He swallowed again, steeling himself. Maybe she just needed a night's sleep - real sleep, not whatever strange coma she'd been in - in her own bed. He'd always wondered why Clara had held out so long against joining him on the TARDIS, but had been afraid to push her about it. He knew how much she cared for Angie and Artie, but it wasn't like she couldn't have seen them anymore.

"All right, Clara," he forced himself to say gently. "I'll take you home, if that's what you want. Can you… do you want to get out of bed?"

She pushed back the covers slowly, revealing the loose, comfortable clothing that he'd dressed her in when it was clear that she wasn't going to wake up the next day. She said nothing about that, just swung her legs over the edge of the bed with a stiffness that betrayed just how long she'd been immobile.

He wanted to help her sit up, half moved to do so, and felt like he'd been punched in the gut when she visibly flinched away from him. So instead he swiftly stood and moved away, clasping his hands behind his back to hide their shaking.

"Are you sure this is a good idea, Clara? You seem awfully weak. Why not stay here until you get some strength back?"

"I'm fine, Chin-boy," she muttered dismissively, managing to find her way to her feet with the clumsiness of a newborn giraffe. The Doctor gaped at her… Clara had never called him that. Not  _his_  Clara. Only… Oswin.

Oswin, whom maybe she now remembered. Or maybe not. She wasn't telling.

She seemed to find her resolve quickly, and had made it out the door before he even formulated a response. He followed her reluctantly, somewhat taken aback when the next door that Clara passed through led to the console room. Apparently the TARDIS had forgiven her for whatever grudge the two of them had been holding against one another.

Nice.  _Now_  they were getting along. He would have preferred a few more minutes to try to get her to talk. But somehow here they were in the console room, Clara still sort of vague and evasive but clearly expecting to be on her own doorstep in the next two minutes.

"Clara…" he began, then faltered. "Clara…" he repeated, trying to start again.

"Home," she said firmly without glancing back, making her way to the exterior door directly.

What could he do? Refuse? Hold her hostage? Try to force her to talk, when she'd clearly given him every signal that talking with him was the last thing she wanted to do? The Doctor may not have been an expert at reading women's signals, but Clara was making it pretty easy at the moment.

She wanted away from him. Now.

Frustrated, the Doctor blew out a breath and marched to the console, throwing a few extra levers in the hopes that some genius idea would occur to him in the additional seconds. The sight of the chilly lines of Clara's back waiting at the door did not inspire him, and before he knew it the TARDIS was parked around the corner from the Maitland's house, within hours of when he'd spirited her away. Of course. Because  _now_ , the TARDIS was cooperating easily.

And she was out the door, making her way down the street, without even a backward glance.

 _Did she hate him now?_  The Doctor hurried after her, and she turned at the sound of his footfalls behind him.

For a split second she actually met his gaze before staring over his shoulder instead. He was stunned to see the fire blazing there before she tore away. In a flash of insight he realized that she wasn't just trying to get away from him… she was trying to hide from him as well.

Hide what? Was it something about her lives? Something she had learned about him while inside his timestream? Was it encountering his hidden face?

"Clara…" he tried again, and she cut him off with a simple, "No."

No. That was it. Just no. She spun on her heel again and kept walking, but the message was plain. She was heading home. He was not invited.

So should he just let her go?

He couldn't help it, he took another step, and this time when she turned she looked visibly angry. The Doctor froze, and without another word she resumed her journey.

"When… when should I come back?" he called after her, icy fear in his gut, desperately hoping that the answer wasn't a harsh "never."

But no answer was forthcoming. Clara's retreating back was all that he was apparently allowed, and so he stood rooted to the spot until she was out of sight, wringing his hands helplessly.


	2. Chapter 2

Fortunately for him, he had a time machine. He swept inside, muttering under his breath, and took himself immediately to the next Wednesday that he could easily locate, hoping that that would be the correct amount of time for Clara to be ready to talk.

He forced himself to wait a few minutes after he materialized, hoping that Clara would, as usual, hear the sound of the TARDIS and come to him, thus reassuring him that she was ready for his return. The doors did not swing open; there was no knock. Just a tired, worried old man sitting in a box, waiting for a visitor who apparently was not coming.

With a resigned sigh, the Doctor made his way to the Maitland's front door and knocked, feeling strangely humiliated by the ritual and by having no idea what sort of reception to expect.

Angie swung open the door with unnecessary force, making the hinges squeal. She immediately cocked her hip to the side in a posture that only a teenaged girl was capable of when she saw who stood on the step.

"Well. I don't know whether to call you Clara's boyfriend or not," she announced rudely, making no move to invite him inside.

His hearts sank. This was not good. He attempted to smile a winning smile, but it was hard to know if his face was in an appropriate arrangement or not with the sick feeling welling up inside him.

"Can I come in? Or, or talk to her at least?" Gosh, it didn't sound all that winning when he heard himself saying it in his outside voice. More, well, desperate.

Fair enough.

Angie's smirk was pure schaudenfraude. "I don't know if she wants to talk to you."

No  _Do you want me to check?_  Just that, delivered with relish, as she continued to stand in the doorway and keep him on the front step.

His hands flapped about. "Well? Could you, possibly, perhaps,  _ask_  her? Is she home?"

"No."

Well, she could have just said that first. The Doctor drooped. There was nothing for it. He was going to have to beg Angie for any snippets of information that the little brat was willing to dole out. He was at her mercy.

"But she, but she still lives here, yes? I mean, she's just out for a moment, she'll be back soon?"

Angie scoffed as if it were the stupidest question she'd ever heard. "Well, she's moving out and  _I_  think it's all because of you. Not that I mind or something. I don't need a nanny, obviously."

Her words were spiteful, but the Doctor even through his anguish saw the ghost of the hurt that her anger was meant to conceal. He softened.

"Angie, I'm sorry. I think I may have bollixed things up somehow on that last trip. I need to talk to Clara, to try to make it better. Can you help me?"

She eyed him narrowly, taking her time to think about it.

"Well," she drew out slowly, "she usually gets over it pretty quickly when she's angry or upset. But not this time. I'd guess that she really doesn't want to talk to you yet." Her words were almost reluctant, as if she hated to say anything remotely helpful.

Okay. Well, that was something. The "yet" gave him his first glimmer of hope, however miniscule.

"Well, okay. That's okay," he blurted out, shifting about on the step where he felt caught like a fly in a web. "But do you think she's okay? Does she seem okay?"

Angie rolled his eyes and started to shut the door. "I don't know. She seems weird."

The Doctor threw out a hand to hold the door open and Angie didn't seem inclined to force it, but he knew he hadn't much time to get any more information out of her.

"How long should I wait?" he asked quickly, eager for even the tiniest clue of how to precede. How would Angie know how long he should wait?

"I don't know. She's got an apartment and she's moving this weekend. Maybe you should let her settle in there for a bit. Then go suck up or something. Better make it good."

And with that, the latch of the door, right in his face. The Doctor sighed and turned away.

Okay, what now? Maybe Angie's acridly-delivered advice was sound… if Clara was moving out of the Maitland's, maybe she needed her own space. And maybe if he let her have some for a bit, then she'd be ready to talk? Back in the console room, he paced, trying to reason it out. Should he aim for the first Wednesday after her move? No, wait, that would be pushing her, wouldn't it? He was always so impatient; it came of never having to wait. Maybe the second Wednesday. No, wait. He was still pushing, wasn't he? Angie had said that Clara usually got over things quickly, but she wasn't this time. Maybe he should give her some extra time.

But he still had to find out where she was moving to. And maybe, maybe it wasn't a bad idea to try to get a better read on the situation before he repeated his front-door routine at Clara's new door. Maybe he could kill two birds with one stone - what a horrible human saying that was. Not as bad as some Gallifreyan ones that he could recall, he supposed.

And so he found himself aiming for the Maitland's again, but this time on an evening, when he hoped that Mr. Maitland would be at home.

For the first time since Clara had awoken on board the TARDIS, a single thing went his way, and Mr. Maitland was indeed the one to open the front door this time when he knocked.

"Ah," he said coolly, before the Doctor could say a word. "You must be the boyfriend that Artie told me about."

Once again the Doctor tried for a relaxed, charming smile, and thought he might have managed a better approximation this time. "I must," he affirmed, reaching out a hand, which Mr. Maitland seemed to consider briefly before assenting to shake. "Mr. Maitland, I'm so sorry to interrupt your evening, but I was hoping for just five minutes of your time. I promise to keep it brief." The Doctor was not well-practiced at humble, but tried to keep some version of it in his back pocket for critical moments like this.

Angie and Artie's father was a handsome man, but one who looked like he brooked little nonsense. He was openly skeptical as he looked over his strange visitor.

"Frankly, I'm not sure she'd even want me to let you in the house. She moved out last weekend, but I made clear to her that this is her home whenever she wants it." His words were firm, and there was no doubt that Mr. Maitland was not inclined to receive him warmly after whatever Clara had been going through in his home recently.

The Doctor held up his hands appeasingly. "Fine, of course, of course. I have no desire to crowd her, Mr. Maitland. Truly. But maybe… could you perhaps provide me with a forwarding address? And perhaps some ideas on how best to grovel to Clara's liking?"

At that, Mr. Maitland cracked the hint of a smile, but only for a second. "Grovel, eh?" he prompted.

The Doctor was grateful for even the tiniest opening. " _Ardent_  groveling," he clarified. "Ardent, protracted, committed groveling, if that's what's called for."

Mr. Maitland considered him for a moment, and the Doctor was struck by his resemblance to his daughter some days before. For once he kept his mouth shut and a hopeful look on his face.

Mr. Maitland finally sighed and relaxed his stance a notch, which also seemed to open up a wave of reproach. "Young man, I have no idea what you did to Clara, as she refuses to talk about it, or you. But I have certainly never seen her in this state, and frankly, I'm worried about her. So you tell me… do you think that you have an idea of how to make it right?"

The Doctor firmly tamped down his indignation at the form of address from a man a fraction of his age and leaped at the opening instead. "How can I try, if I can't talk to her?" he asked, thinking that it sounded unusually reasonable, for him.

After a moment, when there was no change of expression from the family patriarch, the Doctor thought perhaps he could practice some more extensive groveling now, as he may need it if he ever did manage to track down Clara. He swallowed and tried to look convincingly human.

"Mr. Maitland, I am so very sorry for any distress that I have caused Clara, and there is nothing in this universe that I want more than to find out how to make it right. I know that she and I haven't had a very… traditional… courtship -" here he was fumbling for words a bit, "- but I care for Clara very, very much. Please help me, I beg you. It is killing me that she is not even giving me a chance to fix it." He was shocked to hear his voice choke slightly on the last words, and realized that his act was not very much of an act.

After another moment, that earned a single nod. "Fine. You wait here. I'll write down her address. But young man… don't you _dare_  show back up in her life and make this thing worse. I care for Clara like I do for my own daughter, and I invite you to imagine what I'll do to the first boy to break Angie's heart the way that you have broken Clara's."

The Doctor nodded, silently, unwilling to take any risk of saying the wrong thing and prompting Mr. Maitland to change his mind after this tiny scrap of progress that he had finally eked out.

The younger man stepped away for a moment, then returned with a scrap of paper in his hand and handed it to the Doctor.

That was that, and the Doctor made good his goodbye without pushing his luck any further. He bounced back into the TARDIS this time, nursing the tiny flame of hope that procuring Clara's new address had lit for him. He had decided to give her a month. He hated losing the time, he hated every week of Clara's life that passed for her between their adventures together, weeks that he was not a part of. But right now it was more important that she not feel pushed.


	3. Chapter 3

He exited the TARDIS, barely noticing that he was holding his breath. The address that Mr. Maitland had given him landed him in front of a huge grey edifice made of concrete, with jagged stairwells climbing up the middle of the building. It was depressing, but as he looked upward he noticed a single unit with plants overflowing the balcony and colored flags flapping in the breeze, and was visited by the certainty that that was Clara's new abode.

He sprinted up the stairs, sliding to a halt in front of her nondescript door and attempting to compose himself. He ran his hands unhelpfully through his mop of hair as if entertaining the notion that he would be better coiffed after this act, and straightened his bowtie with a well-practiced motion.

He knocked, lightly, and waited.

And waited.

And… waited.

The moment stretched out, endless. What would he do if she was in there, but simply refused to answer? What was he supposed to do next?

Fortunately, so very fortunately, he was spared the dilemma, as after a length of time that made it clear that she had been engaged in some sort of debate with herself, the door finally opened, slowly.

His breath caught in his throat at the sight of her. She didn't look much the worse for wear… she was as tidy and stunningly beautiful as ever, in one of her too-short skirts, her nails trimmed, her hair caught up in a casual bun. Her face, however, was pale and expressionless, and though the dark circles under her eyes weren't pronounced, the Doctor noticed them.

"Clara," he breathed, and then was left without any idea of what to say next.

He finally got a break, though, as she stepped backward out of the doorway, allowing him to enter. She was still showing the same pointed avoidance of eye contact, but she turned and led him into a sparsely-but-colorfully decorated living area and seated herself opposite his chair, on her couch. Her posture was erect, her knees pressed together, though she didn't fidget.

He wanted to get down on his knees and plead for some sign of warmth, of connection, but there was none. His Clara, totally cut off to him. His throat tightened.

"I've been thinking about what to say to you," she told him softly, then paused. "Thank you, for giving me some time to think."

He just nodded silently, his eyes searching her face for some sign of life, some spark of Clara.

"I… I want to give you whatever you want, Clara, but you understand, I need you to tell me what that is. I don't know what to do otherwise."

There. That was sensible. Not pushy, but certainly fair, he thought.

She nodded, a small smile ghosting past, but the first he'd seen even a trace of. "I know, Doctor," she admitted, and for the first time there was just the tiniest bit of Clara in her voice.

He spread his hands…  _Tell me_ , he pleaded silently, and after a moment, she began to.

"Doctor… you have to understand. I… I don't even have the words to describe what happened to me in there. It was all so confusing."

There was another long pause, but he kept quiet. She turned her head a little more away from him, as if the curtain of her hair would provide some privacy.

"I can't remember it all, for which I'm grateful. I think I'd have gone mad… at times I've thought I have anyway. It's been hard to sort out, one lifetime from the next, with huge chunks missing from them all. You know?"

In a way, he did know. Certainly after each regeneration, it took some time to get a new hold on the memories of his previous lifetime, and over enough of them, they'd gotten quite jumbled in places. He wasn't any good at linear anyway.

"I could have helped you," he had to say, then regretted it immediately.  _No pushing_ , he reminded himself.

"I didn't want your help," she said bluntly. "And I still don't."

Okay. He inhaled sharply, stung.

Suddenly she shook her head ruefully and shot him the briefest of smiles. "I'm sorry, Doctor. None of this is your fault, I know that. You didn't make me do it. It was my choice."

He was visited by hope and fear simultaneously as his next question occurred to him. "Do you regret it?"

"No," she said quickly, and he was grateful for the emphasis. Then, more quietly, "No, I don't regret it. But Doctor… you don't know what I experienced in there. Most of the… most of the times that - " and here she choked up. The Doctor badly wanted to move toward her, take her hands, pull her to him, tell her how strong she was, but he refrained.

She composed herself. "Most of the times that we've met, you never saw me." She lifted her chin, slightly, as if in defiance, but of what, he did not know. Of him?

He nodded. "I realize that."

Still looking at a spot near the ceiling, she delivered her next words calmly. "And I wasn't always human."

The Doctor was perplexed, trying to unravel what she was getting at. He kept his voice gentle. "Clara, I know. I did encounter Oswin. I mean, I remember what she did for me. How could I ever forget?" She? You? He wasn't quite sure.

She was shaking her head. "No, no. I mean, yes. That was… that one was bad. Well, they were all bad. But Doctor, I knew they would be when I did it. River told me what would happen, but I still did it. I don't hold that against you."

Then what, what was all this? What was the terrible secret?

Finally Clara looked him square in the eye. Again he was amazed at the intensity there, not quite knowing what to make of it.

"Do you remember the day you stole the TARDIS?"

Flashes of memory. Him. Susan. The museum. It was only a thousand years ago, give or take, and more lifetimes than he could count on two hands, and he both remembered it like it was yesterday and could barely recall it at all. That was what it felt like, as the older memories passed from self to self.

He hadn't thought of it in, what, centuries? No, that wasn't true. The TARDIS had reminded him of it, when she was Idris. That had only been a century ago. Or so. Not really that long.

And then he remembered.

And then, he suddenly remembered.

How could he have forgotten? She had spoken to him, redirected him from the first TARDIS that caught his eye. A woman. Not any woman.  _Clara._

On Gallifrey.

The Doctor froze, an open look of amazement on his face. Clara had been on Gallifrey.

How could Clara have been on Gallifrey?

 _I wasn't always human_ , she had just said.

She had been…  _Clara_  had been… a Time Lady?

She watched him put it together, her chin still raised, her eyes hot. He reached out toward her, and she flinched again, like she had in those first moments after she awoke, and he pulled away awkwardly.

"Oh, Clara," he breathed. "You were there. You were -"

"Yes." She cut him off. "I was."

The Doctor's mind raced, not knowing what to make of it. Clara had been a Time Lady. Clara  _remembered_  being a Time Lady. It wasn't… it wasn't like meeting another of his people again… the Clara before him was decidedly human, smelled human, felt human. But she could remember a lifetime when she was one of his people, the only other surviving being in the universe that he knew of who could remember Gallifrey.

"How much do you remember?" he whispered hoarsely.

"A lot."

He swallowed audibly, a click in his tight throat. Clara stood up abruptly and began to pace within the small confines of her apartment.

"I remember Gallifrey, Doctor, how beautiful it was." Her voice was thick with emotion, with memory. "More beautiful, I think, than any other planet I've seen, and I've seen a lot of them now. The brilliant suns, the gleaming spires of the cities, the endless fields of waving red grass. I remember the people. The children. Their voices, their songs."

He felt tears well up at her words. Clara remembered Gallifrey. She had lived a lifetime there. He had spoken to her, once, for a moment. How had he ever forgotten? He cursed his aged and feeble brain. In some of his regenerations, he would have caught it the very first moment that he spoke to Clara the Victorian governess, but then why in hell should he even have thought it possible that he recognized her face from  _Gallifrey_?

"Oh Clara." He could hear awe in his voice.

She turned, then, and looked at him directly, and squared her shoulders resolutely.

"And so I understand why we can never be together."

He blinked, stunned. Why  _what_?

He stood and moved toward her, and this time she didn't back away, just stood her ground, but he didn't have the heart to try to touch her and have her pull away one more time. Instead they faced each other, the Doctor's face imploring.

"What are you talking about?" he asked anxiously, hands wringing again.

She eyed him with steely resolve. "Regardless of what I remember, I'm human. You are a Time Lord. We can't ever be together. I understand that now."

He couldn't help the edge of his frustration in his voice. "But… we've  _been_  together. For months now, in your time. Why can't… why can't we keep… being together?"

Her smile was sad. "Ah, Doctor. The most brilliant mind in the universe, and you don't have a clue what I'm saying."

He gestured helplessly. "No, Clara Oswald, I really don't. Why don't you explain it to me?"

She sighed. "No."

Again, it wasn't what he'd been expecting. No? Just like that, no? He threw up his hands. "Well, why not?"

She turned away from him. "Please, Doctor. Don't make this harder. Please, just leave."

No. No, no, no. He didn't understand anything that was happening, but his voice was thick with his despair. "Clara, please don't send me away again. Please just tell me what you mean.  _Please_ , Clara, my Impossible Girl, I'm telling you that I can help you with this. I can make it easier. Please, don't just shut me out."

Her face was shuttered, and he would have given anything for just a single glimpse of what was going on inside of her. Panic was beginning to set in.

"There's nothing to be gained from letting you in," she stated simply, again refusing to make eye contact. "Please, I'm asking you. Just leave me alone."

"You mean… forever?" he whispered, horrified.

She flinched at the word, and he hoped that that flinch meant that the idea of him leaving her alone forever was as distressing for her as it was for him. But she turned her body away from him, and it was a nearly-literal cold shoulder.

"I don't know," she replied in a tired voice. "I need you to go away, and I need to think!"

He held up his hands in supplication now, ready to settle for any glimmer of hope. "Okay. Clara, okay, I'll go. Just tell me when I can come back. I'll respect it, whatever you want. But tell me that I can come back!"

She said nothing for a while, frowning, and he was relieved that she was at least thinking about it. After a long, terrifying moment, she turned back toward him and looked him in the eye.

"A year."

He blanched. A year. She was human, her life was so short, and she was asking him to miss a year of it? He regarded the expression on her face, and he assented anyway, though it tore at his hearts to do so.

"If… if that's what you need, then okay, Clara, I'll do it. I'll… I'll leave, and I'll come back in a year."

Suddenly the fire in her eyes was back, blazing hotter than ever. "And you have to go the long way around."

"What?!" The horrified exclamation escaped him before he could bite it back, but she was continuing anyway, almost musing as she went.

"Yes, that's it. You can come back in a year, but I need you to go the long way around. I just… it won't be the same, knowing you'd be back on my doorstep in a year, but it'll be five minutes from now for you. It won't work. That's how it has to be."

The Doctor choked on his objections. This was ridiculous! He had a time machine, what did it matter how long it was for him?

But seeing her face, her beautiful face so deeply troubled and hurt and distant, he knew he could deny her nothing. He worried at his lip slightly, wondering if she would know if he cheated.

_Rule one…_

But apparently she was wise to his ways. Her eyes narrowed. "I'll know if you're lying," she reminded him, probably rightly.

Again he wanted to demand to know why it mattered, but at this point he was terribly frightened of pushing his luck. So instead he nodded, knowing that his expression could probably best be characterized as a sullen pout at the moment and just not sure what to do about it.

"Clara… for you, I will do this. Okay? I would do anything you asked of me, and I can't imagine much that would be harder for this, but…" He tried to catch her eye, to hold it for a moment. "If you're telling me that this is what you need, then I will do it."

She nodded then, grimly satisfied. "This is what I need."

He wanted to stall, to stay in her presence a moment longer, to shake her until she told him what had happened to her in there, to make her explain what she meant that they couldn't be together. It was no good. His Clara also happened to be impossibly stubborn, and she had clearly made up her mind, and there was nothing for it.

"So… that's it?" he asked. "I just leave now, and do whatever I do for a year, and then I come back and see if you'll talk to me then?"

She shrugged as if it were no big deal. "Yes, that's it. What's a year to you?"

He laughed bitterly. "A year without you? Torture."

She flinched at that, and some petty part of him was relieved that he could still make her flinch. At least she cared enough that he could still hurt her. Not that that was probably his best course of action.

She turned as if to look out the window, but he suspected that she wasn't really seeing much of anything out there. Just turning away from him. Dismissing him.

He pushed aside his frustration and anger. It would get him nowhere. She'd told him what she wanted, now, and as fearful as he'd been at moments that she meant to cut him off forever, he supposed he should be grateful that she was letting him return at all.

His departure was undramatic, but it took him a long moment to compose himself enough to take himself back into the time vortex, to decide what in the universe he was supposed to do with himself next.


	4. Chapter 4

A year. A  _year_. The Doctor paced anxiously around the console, idly flipping levers and switches as he passed.

How was he supposed to wait a year? He would go mad. Madder. He was going mad already, and for him it'd been about an hour since Clara had awakened here aboard the TARDIS. A  _year_?

He could have screamed. He might have actually screamed. He didn't always keep careful track of the difference between thinking something and saying it out loud when he was by himself. Or with others.

The TARDIS floated gently in the time vortex, almost purring to him. The sound/feeling never failed to provide at least a slight soothing stroke to even his worst agitation. It was endlessly frustrating to hail from a people that had attained the dazzling gift of psychic touch, and yet to live with the reality that it was useless in so many situations like these.

Part of his brain dictated to itself a 73-page dialogue between the absurd fantasy that he could convincingly lie to Clara and the obvious truth of the matter. Could he convincingly lie when worlds were at stake, when he'd encountered a mystery that it wasn't safe for his companion to understand, when the astonishing miracle of someone's life was on the line? Obviously. Rule one. But this? Could he look Clara in the eye when she inevitably asked him point blank if he'd kept to his word, and lie with an ounce of aplomb? He agonizingly had to admit to himself that he could not.

He could spend the time trying to find her echoes, to see if he could learn anything about what the sacrifice she'd made had done to her. He felt sick even as he contemplated the idea. If she'd been willing to tell him anything about any of her echoes that he'd never encountered - any of them that hadn't been timelocked, anyway - he could risk tearing a hole in the universe by going to look for her based on those clues. But since her echoes had been scattered across his timestream, all of them existed in coordinates past which he had or would travel at another time. He'd be begging for some ridiculous, catastrophic paradox that would screw up his chances of  _ever_  finding out what was going on.

His agitation was extreme, TARDIS purring lightly against his psyche or not. He flipped one cantankerous lever just a bit too hard and the resultant complaint brought forth a matching  _humph_  of irritation from his vessel.

_Women._

He was hopeless. He had nothing. He was going to have to figure out what to do with himself. He despaired of his ability to keep to his word in the end. Then, suddenly, he froze in place for a moment, reminding himself, inwardly steeling himself.

The man who had ended the Time War was a man who could do even this.

He nodded to himself, and abruptly reached for the scanner to select a new destination.

* * *

 

As the door swung shut behind him, as the sound of the latch reached her ears, she whispered a single word.

The word was  _goodbye_ , but the language was Gallifreyen. Her human palate and human larynx couldn't quite produce every phoneme, but she knew the word just the same.

Clara collapsed on the couch and considered whether to let herself sob. She had no idea if she was doing the right thing, but she knew that she couldn't bear to be near him right now.

She rolled onto her side, curling inward, her hand sneaking down to her thighs as if of its own accord. She squeezed her eyes shut tight, humiliated. She desperately told herself that he hadn't noticed. That he'd been too distressed by her walking away, too distracted by the single revelation that she'd allowed him, that she had lived a life on Gallifrey. More than one life, actually, she was pretty sure, though she hadn't made a point of mentioning that. She'd dropped the bombshell on purpose, taking the chance that it might make him even more persistent - probably would, really - but absolutely needing his attention focused on something other than her.

Her, and her scent. Her, and her body. Her, and her ungovernable reactions to his nearness.

And with that, Clara did indeed begin to sob.

* * *

He was deep in the sub-levels of the TARDIS when a tiny processor buried somewhere equally deeply in his over-busy Time Lord brain finally sent him a ping.

"Sub-levels" was sort of a figure of speech on an infinite vessel that could rearrange its own architecture on a whim. At the moment, technically, he was somewhere above the console room. By some measures. Below it by others, and not at all fixed in space relative to it by many. But he thought of the inner workings of the TARDIS as its sub-levels, and there he was ripping handfuls of wiring and more organic looking bits and bobs from behind a recessed panel when he heard it.

Just an internal  _ping_ , at first. He paused, looking for its source.

Clara. It was something to do with Clara. The Doctor absently let fall whatever had been in his right hand and raised a finger to his mouth, tapping against his lips in intense concentration.

If it was something to do with Clara, then nothing was more important than figuring out what it was.

The last time he'd seen her. In her apartment. She'd been off.

It was ridiculous. Yes, she'd been  _off_. She'd been ripped into countless shards and scattered across his timesteam to live a hundred or a thousand or a million lives, then had all of them slammed back into her human brain in the space of just a couple of minutes. She'd been unconscious for a week, then she'd returned with a secret that she refused to tell him -  _his_  companion, keeping secrets from  _him_  - something that meant that she believed that she couldn't be with him, something to do with the fact that one of her lives had been on Gallifrey, that she had once lived a life as a member of his own species.

Ha. She'd been "off," indeed.

But still.  _Ping. Something, Doctor. C'mon, find it. Look for it. Where is it?_

She'd been off in some way that she didn't want him to notice.

He exhaled in frustration.  _Obviously_. She hadn't wanted anything to do with him, hadn't wanted him to notice  _anything_  about her, as it meant that they were in the same room, which clearly was no longer something that Clara wanted anything to do with. She'd been hiding  _everything_ , except the one hint she'd let drop.

No. No, she hadn't been hiding everything. Well, maybe she had, but more than that, she'd been hiding a specific something.

Something she'd known that he should have been noticing.

 _Ping_. "What?  _What?_ " he barked out loud to himself. What was Clara's secret? He smacked himself in the forehead as he paced erratically around the small closet that he was in.

Something she'd known that he should have been noticing.

He closed his eyes and went back in his mind. Clara's apartment. A huge, lush fern in the corner. Bookshelves, with books arranged haphazardly in places and neatly in others. A kitchenette with the makings for tea on the counter. A stack of unpacked boxes against the far wall. And Clara, shut off, aloof, pushing him away. His Clara, turning her back on him. His Clara, flinching away every time he tried to touch her. His Clara, who had always, always leaned into his touch before.

Flinching away.

 _Ping_. He scowled, his absent gesturing and muttering now frantic.

The scent of tea had hung in the air… it hadn't been long since she'd brewed a pot. The smell of the pages of the books. The living verdant odor of plant life. The taste of Earth's air. The various smells and tastes of the building and the curtains and the groceries.

What had Clara's scent been?

Human, obviously. Distressed, obviously. He didn't need some buried processor in the depths of his ridiculous brain to tell him that.

What had Clara's scent been?

The Doctor froze. Her scent hadn't matched her body language, not at all.

Flinching away. But her scent.

He screwed his eyes shut in frustration.

Clara had been… she had been… he combed carefully over the memory, over Clara's body in that room in his mind, over her tight, repressed posture, over her scent.

She had been impossibly, painfully aroused.

A tool clattered from his other hand.

He was an  _idiot_. He was too old to deserve to go on living, he had gotten too feeble and deranged and stupid to be of any use to anyone. How could he have missed  _that_? It wasn't like it was a subtle scent. She hadn't been - and here he ignored his own body's response to thinking about Clara's arousal - she hadn't been a  _little bit_  aroused.

She must have been nearly out of her mind with it.

And he, in his selfish, myopic panic about her pulling away from him, he had totally, completely missed the biggest clue in the room.

The clue that she had been deliberately trying to conceal, he realized. She'd been trying to shut him out, distract him, redirect him, anything to keep him at a distance, anything to get him away from her as quickly as possible.

She'd been aroused. Painfully, all-consumingly aroused. And he hadn't seen it at all.

He burst from the closet and began pacing the halls, shoving a hand through his hair every now and then. The subject of Clara's mysterious, intense arousal was of course creating its own set of distracting responses for the Doctor, but he had lifetimes of practice at pushing that aside as he just tried to  _think_.

Clara had often been aroused around him before, though he'd never allowed himself to note it more than in the most fleeting of moments before directing his attention to more appropriate subjects. Hell, he'd often been aroused around her, though as a Time Lord it was easy to turn off his own bodily reactions to that. He may be a prude, but he was not a fool, and he had not failed to notice how deeply attracted they had been to one another from the first.

Hell, one of Clara's own echoes had first broken through his habit of ignoring such things when she grabbed him in the Latimer's front foyer and pressed her sweet little mouth against his. Reluctantly he allowed himself to remember that kiss… he had characteristically flailed. But he remembered the feeling of her lips against his, remembered shoving down the urge to plunge his hands into her hair and bury himself in the taste and scent and feel of the beautiful woman in front of him. Hell, he'd probably given her the idea himself, with his ridiculous introduction to Captain Latimer on the stairway. Clearly some part of his obnoxious, unwieldy brain had had the thought long before Clara.

That Clara… an echo of the real Clara… she had kissed him.

The Doctor fought to think clearly despite the topic of his musing. His own Clara, his Impossible Girl, had never showed any such inclinations, in spite of the obvious mutual attraction that had been growing between them over time. But the Victorian Clara had chased his carriage down a street and climbed on top of it to keep him from getting away. Had stayed fixed to his side even as he threatened to wipe her memory with an alien creature as Strax bumbled around acting like a Sontaran. And had thrown herself at him for a kiss the first chance she had gotten. Before the first chance, really. They hadn't yet even dealt with the threat of the snowmen outside and the ice governess upstairs before she had grabbed him in that hallway.

And what about Oswin? She'd no longer had a body by the time that he met Oswin, but they had spent considerable time flirting by voice communication before he'd discovered and revealed Oswin's terrible secret. She'd been incredibly forward, had Oswin. Very forward.

Clara, his Clara, was a flirt too. That part of her echoes made sense. But for all her teasing about snogging booths and being too keen, she'd been wary of him at first. As any reasonable human was when the Doctor bumbled into their lives, trailing chaos and danger in his wake. She'd acted with the reservations of a normal human, and the attraction that she obviously felt for him had been growing over time, naturally.

What about Oswin, though? If she had still had a body, would she have grabbed him even before they escaped the Asylum and brought their mouths together in a teeth-clinking kiss? He had a growing suspicion that he knew the answer to that.

He barely noticed as he passed through a doorway back into the console room, not having deliberately been heading that way. His hands played soothingly over the console as he struggled with his analysis.

When she passed into his timesteam, she'd been shattered, and each of her shards had fallen near to his passage through space-time. But how was it to be ensured that she would fulfill her mission? How could the limited, subconscious echo of his own mind that made up the psychic space of his timesteam ensure that his savior would indeed fill her role?

Her ghosts would need to be motivated, to find him. To stay near him whenever she did. As close as possible, so that she would be able to sacrifice herself and save him when the time came.

And their attraction had already become substantial before he took her to Trenzalore. So it was easier to build on that than to construct something new.

He'd infected her. Inside of his timesteam, not deliberately or even consciously but still, his disembodied, mindless Time Lord psyche had solved the problem with his usual ruthless disregard of consequences.

He had infected her with longing and desire and love, with a brutally compelling version of longing and desire and love, and now the real Clara,  _his_  Clara, was still infected.

And her response had been to send him away, because it was far too painful to live with as a real girl.

And it was all his fault.


	5. Chapter 5

It was easier, being apart from him. It was easier, and it was hell.

She easily found a real job, teaching at a nearby school. Easily made friends there, but also retained the friends she had made at university, before she'd stayed with the Maitlands for a year. Easily bonded with her students. Easily built a life, a decent, full, meaningful life.

Eventually she even learned to enjoy her life, parts of it anyway, although that bit was anything but easy.

Her dreams were a mess, though, and she developed recalcitrant insomnia that resisted every idea she could think of to relieve it.

And her fantasies? Daydreams, sexual fantasies, the whole shebang? She didn't even dare. Best not to go there. It made it so much harder, to go through each day not expecting to hear the distinctive wheeze of the TARDIS materializing somewhere in her vicinity. It was better for Clara to forget that she even had fantasies, or desire, or urges. Or a life before Coal Hill. Or a Doctor.

She was sitting in the staff room, making her way slowly through a huge and delicious bowl of chowder, and with her nose buried deep in a gripping novel. It was a Friday, and somewhat unusually, Clara was alone. A number of the staff were out supervising a field trip and the school was a little less bustle-y than usual with so many students off-campus.

She heard the scuff of feet, and even after all this time she hadn't been able to rid herself of the very tiny part of her that looked up hopefully whenever someone new entered a room that she occupied. It was a heartbreak in miniature, a hundred times a day. Not to mention those ever-less-frequent occasions when for one sickening, conflicted moment she thought that she heard a very distinctive wheeze in the distance.

It was, unsurprisingly, just a colleague. Tom, in fact, to whom she had grown closest in the past few months. His hair was mussed slightly, and when he saw her, he paused, then came to join her. "Hi, Clara," he greeted her, just a bit breathless as he so often seemed to be.

She put down her novel, carefully marking her place, and shoved her bowl forward an inch. "This corn chowder is amazing. Do you want some?"

"Nah." She noticed then that Tom seemed nervous. Fidgety.  _Oh no._  Was he finally going to try it? She brushed her hair back and peered at him with concern.

"You okay?" she asked, hoping he just had the onset of a flu or something.

But he was watching her closely, and Clara sighed inwardly. She'd been a lifelong flirt, had Clara, and she knew the signs well enough.

"I'm fine," he said dismissively, then shifted in his chair. "Clara… I've been meaning to talk to you."

She looked at him expectantly. Better to get it over with, then. Be as gentle as she could. "Okay. Here I am."

Her level regard didn't seem to do much to help his nerves, and he pressed his palms down on his thighs, wiping them discretely against the fabric of his trousers.

"Well, I've really been enjoying the time that we've been spending together. Here at school, but also… after school. I've been enjoying it quite a bit."

Clara smiled at him, trying to look reassuring without being encouraging. What a shame. She'd been enjoying spending time with Tom as well, but it looked like that was about to get a good deal more complicated.

"I've been enjoying our friendship as well, Tom," she said, trying to offer a gentle hint. "It's good to have a proper friend at a new workplace, you know."

He bobbed his head, clearly too intent on his point to stop and notice her turn of phrase.

"Well, I've been thinking. I would like us… I would like to be more than friends. To try it, I mean." He looked flustered, and she worried that this was not going well for poor Tom. "I mean, I would like to take you out. On a date. Somewhere nice. If you would like that. And I'm hoping that you would."

This time Clara's sigh was outward, she couldn't help it, and Tom blushed furiously.

"Tom…" She shifted forward slightly, giving him a sad smile. "That's very sweet."

He looked pained, and it occurred to her that sweet, friendly, innocuous Tom may have heard those words before in similar circumstances. That he was the guy who many women made a friend of, but few wanted for a boyfriend. It truly was a shame. He was a great guy.

A great, human guy.

She owed him some snippet of the truth, something to soften the blow. "Tom, I have to tell you something. I… I really don't date. Ever. Anyone. It's not about you. I would have to tell you no, no matter who it was asking."

His brow furrowed, and Clara was touched that his first response was concern for her. "Why… why not? Is… did something bad happen?"

She nearly laughed aloud at that. Had something bad happened? Well, yes, yes, she supposed that it had. For the sake of her new friend, she kept her unhappy smirk of regret on the inside.

"I just… it's hard to explain. I'm sorry, Tom, I'm not trying to be all mysterious. Dating just… it doesn't work out for me. Wouldn't work out. It's just… it's not for me."

" _Wouldn't_  work out?" he echoed hopefully. "Well, have you tried it?"

She allowed herself a huff of amusement at that. "Not in a long time. But believe me, I have every reason to be sure."

"But how can you?" He was studying Clara, and she suddenly felt uncomfortable with his regard. Tom sat forward a bit, his mood shifting slightly, looking at her more closely. "It's someone else, isn't it? Clara, really, it'd be easier if you just told me, if that was it. If you're going to work here I guess I'm going to have to meet him eventually, and believe me, I'd rather just hear it from you now."

_It's someone else, isn't it?_

Why yes, yes it was.

Clara's second sigh was a tired one. Ah, Tom. Right on the mark, and lightyears away from it.

She was suddenly too exhausted to lie or evade, and her shoulders slumped for a moment. "Yes, Tom, it's someone else. But it didn't work out, and that's that. I know it sounds melodramatic, but I'm done with it all. I have to be. Tom, I really want to go on being friends. I don't want to lose your friendship just because I'm all… just because I don't have that part of me anymore."

Tom's sweet brown eyes were wide with concern as he listened. "Clara, you're so young. It's okay to take time to… to get over things, you know? I've had bad breakups too. But that doesn't have to mean never."

She nearly laughed aloud at the idea of what had happened with the Doctor being characterized as a "bad breakup." It was comical, really. Painfully, accurately comical, in its way.

"It really wouldn't be fair for me to leave you with false hope, Tom," she said flatly, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear. "It's not something I want to talk about, but you're going to have to believe me. This is the way it is. You can't really just… wait this out."

He sat back, clearly frustrated now. "Well, how am I supposed to understand if you won't explain it, Clara?"

_Well, how am I supposed to understand if you won't explain it, Clara?_

Clara was struck dumb for a moment as his question echoed in her ears.

_…how am I supposed to understand…?_

Who could understand, unless she explained it?

No one, that was who.

Clara stood abruptly and left the staff room, the sound of her dropped spoon rattling against the table the only company left to poor, sweet, concerned Tom.

* * *

Once he'd unraveled at least a part of the mystery, the waiting was all the harder.

He tried visiting every engaging, adventurous destination he could think of, hoping to distract himself. He tried retreating back to the monastery - he got the distinct impression that the monks had not missed him a whole lot - to read and paint and tinker and think and, well, brood, to be frank about it. He even tried flirting a bit - in spite of his general prudishness and discomfort about all things humany-wumany, he did have a few tricks up his sleeve, as River Song had once learned - and found that it just left him with a sour taste in his mouth.

What he wanted, was to go to Clara. To tell her what he had figured out. To help her, to try to make right what he had done, whether she wanted him to or not.

But he was afraid of her reaction if he showed up early. She'd been a hair's breadth from telling him to never come back, he knew that she had. It left him with a sneaking suspicion that he still hadn't quite put all of the pieces together, and that left him unnerved at the prospect of insisting upon a confrontation.

How did his realization of the lingering effects of the programming that he'd forced onto her echoes tie in with her life on Gallifrey? That was the part that he couldn't quite put together, and he feared that it had something to do with some entirely human interpretation of events that he was just not equipped to reproduce, no matter how hard he thought about it.

The Doctor was in his way quite poor at keeping track of time in spite of his profound psychic connection to the time vortex through which the TARDIS traveled. He'd set up a internal clock of sorts, but he wasn't sure how well it was tracking through all his various attempts at distraction. He was determined to keep to his word - to preserve every chance of working this thing out with Clara - but dubious about how it was going.

It was a dream that ruined it all.

He'd fallen asleep reading in the console room, which was how many of his infrequent sleep cycles finally caught up to him. It wasn't dignified, but he was terrible at putting himself to bed in time. There was just too much to  _do_.

But eventually he always found himself sprawled awkwardly (and uncomfortably) across the steps, glasses slipping down off his nose, book having fallen to the side and inevitably having crumpled at least a few pages. During the times that Amy and Rory had stayed aboard the TARDIS for extended adventuring, he'd often awoken with a blanket tucked around his sleeping body, a pillow tucked under his head, his book and glasses folded neatly to the side. No more. Now he just awoke sore and grumpy and alone from his occasional nap.

God, he still missed Amy and Rory.

And he missed Clara so badly it hurt.

The dream actually began pleasantly enough, a dream of leading a young Amelia Pond through the red fields of Gallifrey by the hand. It was a strange dream - his lives before and after Gallifrey rarely intersected in his dreams - but she'd been laughing and he'd been telling her of his childhood, and the sound of her happy voice was like a balm on his ragged, aching soul.

Young Amy had been wearing the dark red pinafore that Gallifreyen children so often wore, but then he was in the museum's repair shop and it was Clara wearing an adult's version of the same garb. Except now it was clearly a memory.

She was talking to him, but he couldn't understand what she was saying. Her words were Gallifreyen, but it was as if he himself didn't speak the language. The Doctor was reaching for her, but she turned from him and ran, and for some reason he couldn't follow.

This was Clara as a Time Lady. What this version of her had done after their brief conversation a millennium ago he did not know… had she also sacrificed her life for him, or had she completed her mission of saving him when she directed him to the TARDIS that had become his home? As a Time Lady, had she been driven by the same programming that her human selves had? Or had it worked differently based on her species?

He was chasing her, Clara the Time Lady, through the corridors of the TARDIS, though occasionally when he managed to catch a glimpse of her around the corner she was wearing a short red dress of human cut and had her hair pulled up in a bun. Then her dress was short and dark, her hair swinging loose around her shoulders. Recalling both times that he'd run like this with Clara in the real world, after the Van Baalen's magno-grab had almost destroyed the TARDIS and again at Trenzalore, inside his grave.

Then they were back on Gallifrey and he was chasing her through the same fields that he'd been leading Amy through, but now she was dressed in a dark blue dress of Victorian cut. He didn't know if it was Clara or one of her echoes, whether she was a Time Lady or a human as she fled from him. He called to her but it was like she couldn't even hear him. All she did was run.

He was breathless and frantic by now, and the world lurched around them when he finally caught her by the arm and spun her back to face him. She was back in the garb of Gallifrey now, and when he pulled her into his arms she raised her face with parted lips to open herself to the kiss. Their mouth crashed together violently, and he knew exactly what her species was as their minds fell together the moment that their lips met.

How long had it been since he'd kissed one of his own people? He let the thought slip away, as it was unimportant next to the reality of her scalding hot mouth against his and the tendrils of her psyche wending together with his own. The kiss went on for a long, long time, and all he knew was that Clara was in his arms and that that she had welcomed the frantic, hot meeting of their minds and souls as well as their mouths.

Then she pulled away, and he tried to hold on to her but for some reason he could not. She was turning away in disgust, dragging the back of her hand across her mouth as if to scrub it clean. The Doctor felt sick as he realized that she hadn't been welcoming him after all, he'd gotten it all wrong again. She shot him a look of revulsion, and finally he could hear her words as she spoke again.

"Never," she cried in Gallifreyen. "I am human! It can't be like this!"

And then she dissolved in front on him, disappearing into the rising, glowing fissures of his timesteam that were swallowing her body whole no matter how he tried to pull her back. He cried out in wordless protest, and suddenly found himself sweating and crying on the floor of the console room, alone with no feelings except for his despair.

The Doctor turned on his side and curled in on himself, trying to quiet the sobbing that wouldn't let go of his aching, aroused body.


	6. Chapter 6

Clara assumed that she would have a much better sense than the Doctor of when a year had passed… to be fair she was passing time in a linear fashion, which did make it quite a bit easier. Also he tended to be absent-minded about these things even when he had the best of intentions. Accordingly she'd been prepared for him to show up early or late, and even rather comically tried to convince herself that she would be fine if he never showed up at all. She attempted to ascribe no special importance as the date of the anniversary of their last meeting approached.

But she knew the date - how could she forget? - and he didn't come early. Which meant, she assumed, that he would be late instead.

And yet, as she made her way back to the apartment complex from Coal Hill, she couldn't help scanning the horizon, listening closely for a particular, distinctive wheeze. She never heard it, as the still-familiar shape of the TARDIS already awaited her in the meadow beside her building upon her return home from work.

Clara stood paralyzed, studying the TARDIS for long moments from afar. It was surreal, to see her again after so long. She looked exactly the same, of course. Clara wondered if she herself did as well.

She couldn't go to him. Wouldn't go to him. If she went upstairs, he would come up eventually. She knew he would. With a heavy heart she dragged her satchel up the many flights, wondering how long it would take him to break down and come up himself. How long it would be until she finally saw the Doctor again. Her Doctor.

As the TARDIS had managed to surprise her, so did the Doctor himself. As she emerged from the stairwell into the long hallway, there he was. Slumped on the floor beside her door, his head hanging forward between his knees, his floppy hair covering his eyes, bowtie in place. But his head snapped up at the scuff of her boot on the floor, and he saw her almost as soon as she'd seen him.

He nearly leaped to his feet but refrained from rushing toward her. Clara approached him slowly, feeling a strong rush of heat through her entire body already. Her cautious advance gave the impression that he was a wild animal whose responses she was unsure of, but the reality was that she didn't trust herself to know what either of them would do.

Their eyes were locked as they got nearer, and she felt like cold bands of steel were tightening around her heart as she saw the deep, lonely sadness in his. He was searching her gaze, as if looking for some sign of the reception he was about to receive. Fair enough, given how clumsily she'd handled things right after Trenzalore.

"Doctor." She was relieved that her voice did not break on his name, considering the throbbing that had begun deep in the pit of her stomach. Lower, really.

"Clara," he replied, and he was not so composed.

No hug. Nothing about her body language allowed it. The intervening year apparently had not extinguished her wild responses to his proximity, but it wasn't as maddening, as confusing, as overwhelming as it had been when she had first awoken after Trenzalore. Clara turned, fishing her key from her pocket, and unlocked her door, ushering him inside as if mere moments had passed since their last meeting.

She went about her usual coming-home rituals of hanging her coat and bag and dropping her keys in a bin on the kitchen counter as if he were not even there, as if her knickers weren't rapidly moistening themselves between her legs, as if she couldn't feel his eyes following her every move. He had barely moved into the living room, unsure if he were still welcome if he got more than three feet from the front door. She gestured him at a seat, and set about brewing a pot of tea.

The silence hung heavy between them, as Clara strove to find the words that she had practiced so many times before today. She found that with some effort she was able to remember the various tools that she'd found to attempt to keep a damper on the blazing intensity of her body's involuntary reactions.

When she finally turned, two teacups in hand, she was alarmed at the way he was looking at her. Obviously whatever confusion and distraction had kept him from cottoning onto her problem a year ago was gone. He was watching her exactly like he knew.

Oh god, she didn't know if she could do this.

* * *

"Clara." He kept his distance carefully, kept his hands still at his sides. "I won't even ask you to come with me again if you don't want me to. All I ask is that you let me help you this time." His voice held a note of undisguised pleading.

She was the one to close the distance, placing his tea on the table in front of him instead of handing it to him, but he thought that she was showing deliberately that she could control herself even now that he knew. She took a sip of her own, then sat down, again inviting him with a gesture to do the same. This time he assented, though he ignored the tea.

Her chin tipped upward, and this time he understood her defiance. "I don't need help, Doctor. I've spent a lot of time learning how to ignore it. I'm fine."

Her words were confident but he didn't quite believe her. "You shouldn't have had to learn to ignore it. I did this to you, even if I didn't mean to. I think… Clara, I'm almost certain that I can undo it."

Her eyes flashed at him, and he didn't know if it was anger or something else. "Ah, Doctor. Always assuming that you know what's best for everybody."

He spread his hands in a question. "Don't you want it undone?" he asked plaintively.

Clara laughed at that, a bitter sound, then thought for a moment.

"What would it take?" she asked finally. "To undo it?"

The Doctor felt a surge of intoxicating hope. "You would need to let me see what I've done first, Clara. I can only guess at how it happened, while you were there inside of my timestream. I'd need to get a better look at it in order to be sure of how to unravel it." His words spilled over each other in his eagerness.

She peered at him over the rim of her cup. The scent/taste/feeling of her arousal was strong, increasing by the moment, but there was not a single trace of it on her face.

Well, maybe in her eyes.

"And what, exactly, would getting a better look at it entail?"

He had the decency to meet and hold her gaze. "You would have to let me touch you. Just your face, I mean. Physically. But you would need to let me touch your mind, to see how the glamour was made, and to do that I would need some physical contact. I'm sorry."

The glamour. So that was the word for whatever had happened in there. Clara mused, resolutely ignoring the stirrings in her body that wanted her attention.

She put her cup back on the table, folding her hands demurely in her lap. "And then what? You would fix me, and we could go on our merry way, return to our life of star-hopping and universe-saving as if we hadn't missed a beat?"

There was a time when he would have been confused. After all, what was wrong with exactly that? But now, with so much time to think about it, now he supposed that he understood that that was not exactly possible.

"I don't think so, Clara," he replied, and was gratified when he saw that he had finally surprised her.

He glanced away then, studying the titles of the books on the far bookcase for distraction. "After all, it's not that simple, is it?" he continued. "I might be able to undo the effect, but you'll still have had to endure it for all of those lifetimes. I can't fix that part. And you'll still have seen all you saw, learned all you learned. You'll still have spent that lifetime on Gallifrey. And been inside my timestream. Undoing the glamour wouldn't change any of that."

Now he was sure that she was surprised by how much of it he had put together on his own. Perhaps he hadn't gone entirely senile in his dotage after all.

She was smoothing her skirt over her tights, her lovely face thoughtful as he spoke. He was visited by his dream, by the sudden, strong impulse to grab her face and pull her to him and cover her soft, supple mouth with his own. This was Clara,  _his_  Clara, and he had wanted her even before she became psychically magnetized to him, even before she'd revealed that she was the only other being in the universe who remembered Gallifrey anymore.

She seemed to sense his thoughts, as her gaze was faraway now. "I wish we could have been together then," she said sadly, and the Doctor felt a deep pang in sympathy. If he could have not just met, but known Clara, lovely Clara, impossible Clara, back when she was accomplishing the impossible task of existing on his homeworld. Of being one of his people.

"It wasn't even really you, Clara," he reminded her - and himself - gently. "It was an echo. A figment."

"I know. Every one of them, though, every one of my lives felt real when I was living it. Even that one."

The Doctor took a deep breath. He wasn't sure if he was prepared to go down this road, but he would do anything, anything to get Clara to let him help her.

"During your life on Gallifrey… did you ever take a mate?"

That snapped her out of her revery, and her sudden blazing look was pointed. So they were going to talk about this? And  _he_  was the one who was bringing it up?

She took a breath as if to match his own, then paused. Finally she seemed to come to some sort of decision. "I did. You know, I can't remember his name. He was a good man, and he was kind to me. He loved me. But I knew that I wasn't supposed to be with him."

The Doctor was taken aback by the surge of jealousy that erupted out of a pit inside of him. Oh, Clara. He was visited by an unwelcome image of the woman he'd once met, the Time Lady who had unexpectedly led him to his TARDIS, embraced in the arms of another Time Lord, and he felt sick.

He shoved his own feelings aside. Clara needed him. He swallowed and pushed forward. "He was a good man, good. Was it a good marriage?"

That earned him a smile. A genuine smile, and his hearts swelled. "Would you like the details, Doctor?"

He couldn't fully hide his flinch, and suddenly Clara's expression softened. "I'm sorry. It's easy for me to forget… I know that you have your own feelings. Even if they're not quite the same as mine. I've never doubted how much you love me, you know. Even during the worst of it."

It hung in the air between them, and the Doctor opened his mouth as if to sidestep the word almost out of habit, and then wondered what he was trying to accomplish anyway.

"Well. Yes. There is that," he said instead, and was relieved as a ghost of an expression of - could that be delight? - passed across Clara's face.

Okay. Yes. If this was what she needed, if it would help her deal with what he had done to her, he could reveal his own feelings. If it would make her feel safer, safe enough to let him help her. He braced himself to push past centuries of habit of pretending that this side of him didn't exist when he was with the various humans that he'd come to love.

What else could he say, that wouldn't take them down the wrong road, but would help her to feel what she needed to feel?

The Doctor took a moment to search for the words. "Clara. I know that the last time we spoke, that you thought that I didn't understand what was going on inside of you, and you were right. I was a little slow on the uptake, a little distracted by my sudden eviction from your life. But you know, I did figure it out. And do you know how?"

He finally had her attention. "How?"

He firmed his resolve. "I had a dream, about us. We were.. we were kissing, in the fields of my home. You were Gallifreyen, but it was the real you, Clara, not your echo."

Her eyes were filling with tears at the same time that he noticed her uncomfortable shifting. He wasn't doing much to reduce her state of intense arousal, but he knew that she needed to know that he understood her fears.

"And what did you learn from that, Doctor?" Her voice was a whisper again, her eyes hot and full of painful, bottomless love. Just as they'd always been, even before he'd corrupted her, infected her to serve his own ends, to save him. His Clara had always been full of love. It had been love that had led her to enter his timesteam, and on that day Clara had been acting only of her own accord.

He swallowed and held her gaze. "You think that I can't love you like that, now that I've found the real you and you're human."

Her words were barely audible. "And can you?"

He didn't draw it out, couldn't. He needed to tell her, and she needed to know. "Well. I'd like to give it a try, if you'll let me."


	7. Chapter 7

She blinked at him, and the Doctor was concerned to see how damp her eyes were. Were those good tears or bad ones? He hoped good. Maybe he had a shot at pulling this whole thing out after all. Maybe he would get a chance to make things right with Clara.

She tore her gaze away then, and he could see/hear her pulse hammering against the side of her throat.

The silence stretched out, the Doctor waiting with baited breath, his half-wrung hands frozen in midair.

"Clara?" he prompted gently. "Give me something?"

It broke the ice, and she smiled, though a sad smile. "It's difficult to say yes to that, Doctor, when I'm not sure that I'm convinced it's possible."

He could not help himself, he shifted forward toward her in his seat and was relieved when she did not jerk away. "Clara. I think that I can… undo the glamour that must have been created when you were inside of my timestream, but without having to muck about in your natural emotions very much. If you can be a little bit patient, I think that I can do that. And maybe even help you tidy up a bit in there, if you haven't fully sorted through all of the years of memories that got dumped into your brain."

She nodded. "So what… how do we do it? Do we just… start? Now?"

The Doctor was lifted on a soaring updraft of sweet relief. She was willing to let him try.

"We can start now, if you want. We should go to the TARDIS. Her telepathic circuitry will be helpful on my side."

Clara followed him downstairs readily enough, though it was strange to be walking near her and paying so much attention to not invading her physical space. He'd never fully noticed just how touch-y he had become with Clara before Trenzalore. He constantly had the impulse to take her hand, wrap his arm around her shoulders, or just brush against her as they moved together through the world. It made him wonder just how much of his own inclinations he'd been ignoring before anyway. And he'd thought of Clara and her echoes as the forward ones.

She hesitated outside the door, and the Doctor took the chance of reaching out and gently wrapping his fingers through hers to draw her forward. Her face tightened slightly at first, then relaxed, and she allowed him to pull her across the threshold.  _Selfish, selfish,_  he chided himself, but he hoped that his touch brought her more comfort than distress. It was clear how deep her wariness was of letting him back into her life, and he needed to tread carefully. So completely unlike the normal way he blundered through his life.

He led her to the single seat near the console and urged her into it without any resistance, kneeling beside her. She kept her face turned a few degrees away from him, and he could practically feel her entire body thrumming in response to his proximity. Ah, the wicked things he had done in his lifetime. Many inadvertently, others quite on purpose, and he wasn't entirely sure which category this fell into. He kept reminding himself that Clara had made her choice on Trenzalore of love and her own free will, but it was difficult to see how tortured she was every time that she let him near her.

"Relax, Clara," he coached her in a quiet voice. "I'm going to go slow, and if you remember how to, you can help guide me to where I need to be. I think… that this will feel familiar, to you."

She licked her dry lips, eyes fixed over his shoulder. "Okay." She didn't sound okay, but then, that was the point of all this, wasn't it?

The Doctor reached for her slowly, cupping her soft cheek in one palm. She closed her eyes instantly and leaned into his touch, and the Doctor was embarrassed by how good even that slight welcome felt to him.

All of that was swept aside, though, as he was visited by the sudden vertigo of falling into her, as their minds practically snapped together instead of brushing against one another like he meant to.

_Go slowly indeed._

He tried to pull back, to slow down, but the pull of the glamour was impressively strong. Clara's psyche was verdant, warm and soft and enticing no matter how she was trying to gird herself, and he realized quickly that he was being pulled in as opposed to controlling the contact himself.

_Nice job, Doctor._

He was fully enveloped inside of her mind before he knew it, and he took a moment to orient himself. She didn't seem to be panicking. Fearful, yes. But she was controlling her fear, and he realized that she was doing it on purpose. He began to discern the many structures that she had constructed, the many walls and dams and levees that had been broken down and patched back up and reinforced. All psyches had some, of course, but Clara had made her mind into a maze in her efforts to deal with what he had put her through.

He pushed his guilt aside, focusing on the job at hand. He made himself known, using as light a touch as he could.

_Clara? Can you feel/sense where I am?_

He felt a sigh like a warm breeze, inquisitive tendrils weaving their way through Clara's psychic ether to find him, their free passage hindered repeatedly by the many walls of the maze.

_Doctor._

The Doctor paused, startled to hear/feel Clara's internal voice so clearly, so coherent. Her mind wasn't quite like any human mind he'd ever touched, not anymore. As he began to probe gingerly around himself, he was disconcerted to realize how many of the structures around him were as reminiscent of the workings of a Time Lord brain as a human one. It wasn't even clear on first glance which ones he had built and which ones she had, or which ones had been imported whole when parts of her lifetime on Gallifrey had been shoved back into this brain.

He couldn't hide his surprise or its nature, not when he was so much deeper inside her mind than he'd initially meant to be. He felt the mental equivalent of that raised chin that had so symbolized her refusal to have her life dictated to her by the compulsions that his glamour had installed deep inside of her. Here, floating in her mental landscape, beginning to discern the scope of what he'd done to her brain, her own cobbled attempts at damage control since then, and the hasty reintegration of too many other lives, he finally began to fully understand why she had sent him away for so long.

 _Oh Clara._  Her trip into his timestream had obviously reshaped everything in here.

He felt/saw warmth, a clear green glow, and moved toward it, and realized that it was Clara, showing him a way forward. It was a good thing, too, as otherwise it would have taken a while to figure out which of the walls of the maze he could start chipping away at or shifting in space without bringing large chunks of the architecture in here tumbling down.

_What did I do to you?_

_Only what I needed you to, so that I could save you._

Forgiveness. Ah, Clara. How could she forgive him this? He'd warped everything in here, stamped himself all over it, like a dog peeing in every corner of the yard. Over and over and over. He'd found every trace of himself - he couldn't exactly tell looking backward, but it was clear that there had been a lot of him in here already, the moment that she entered his timestream. Clara had given him so much to work with, with her open heart and easy love and her clever mind already so enthralled by the mysterious alien who had literally turned up on her doorstep one day and whisked her away to show her the stars. And he'd grabbed it all in his grubby hands and twisted it around and woven it together into nets and cul-de-sacs and booby traps that she could not escape. There were nets strung everywhere in here, ropey, hastily made, with areas of rot that had been patched over with whatever he had found to hand. Clearly his own careless but effective handiwork. Clara's own constructs, painstakingly built by a mind not evolved for it, using second-hand knowledge from lifetimes that she could only halfway-remember, were still tidier than his own.

Surely this was too much to forgive.

_There's nothing to forgive, Chin-boy. Don't you dare cheapen my choice._

He felt the spark of her response, and he found himself smiling to hear Clara's sentiment punctuated with Oswin's cheek. Though he hoped that that particular moniker was not going to stick in a post-Trenzalore world.

_Fat chance of getting off so easy._

He whirled about in a sort of mental jig, indulging in a moment of delight at the slow re-emergence of Clara's natural temperament, and felt her internal giggle in response.

Then he settled and went to work, trying to dismantle some of the more elaborate traps and redirects that he had assembled in her psyche to keep her echoes ever-searching for him through space and time. It was tricky, as over the past year so many of his own machinations and her counter-fortifications had been collapsing into each other, not to mention the chunks of other lives that had been hurled into the middle of it all. And there was a distinctively Time Lord signature to her own efforts that further confused the matter at first glance. He had to slowly pick them most of the way apart before he could undo his own work, trying to leave as much of hers in place as possible, just tidying it up where he could without leaving too many of his dirty fingerprints smeared across it.

After only a few moments the work suddenly started to become easier, and he realized that she had been watching/feeling what he was doing and was starting to emulate his techniques. It was funny, sometimes he forgot that people other than him were geniuses in their own right. The Daleks had recognized it when they chose Oswin for conversion, and he was reminded of it now.

It felt good, this intimacy. She was fairly deft at hiding or sharing her thoughts as she intended to, and he was careful not to poke into any corners. But no matter how cautious she was being, no matter how light his touch, she was allowing him inside of her mind, her psyche, and it felt… well, honestly, it felt incredible. He had missed her so, and at this moment he was closer to her than he had ever been before.

Then one of them stumbled… he thought it was probably her, but couldn't be sure. Initially just a single mis-step, a wall that crumbled unexpectedly where it should have just given way slightly, an overbalance. Whichever one of them was still stable instinctively grabbed mentally for the other, to help, and wound up off-balance as well in a different direction, and then they were simultaneously flailing toward one another and falling apart, and whatever had been under them and holding them up was suddenly sliding sideways and dissolving into a cacophony of sound and memory, and he was disoriented by the sudden flood of figures and landscapes and objects that he was drifting within.

_Clara!_

But Clara was gone, and not gone. He realized that the psychological quicksand that had sucked him in had come from one of her echoes, that not just their memories but in places huge chunks of their psyches had been shoved back into the original Clara's head. That was why he was so disoriented. This landscape was her, but not her. Almost-her. But the almost was enough to bewilder him as he struggled to re-gain his bearings.

He heard/felt a deafening roar rushing toward him, and spun himself just in time to see the tsunami of terror bearing down on him before he was swept under, spluttering. He churned about in the undertow, trying to stay calm and figure out what was frightening this echo so, and he realized what had happened just before the memory began to unspool.

He had stumbled into one of her deaths.

And a split-second later, he realized with dread that this part of Clara was still very much a child.

Suddenly there she was, he could see her, a sweet-faced girl with her hair in elaborate braids, and she seemed to be struggling to get to him while something was pulling her away. She was screaming his name wordlessly, and the Doctor watched in horror as the flesh began to peel away from the bones of her face.

 _Doctor!_  the little girl screamed, in torment.  _Doctor, run!_

Child-Clara was still trying to save  _him_ , was terrified to see him still in the path of danger even as her sacrifice was coming to fruition. She didn't understand that she was a figment, that the Doctor that she was encountering was from the future, was perfectly safe.

He backed away furiously, sure that his presence could only frighten and scare this part of her that was still buried so deep in the programming he'd installed. He was falling backward as if through molasses, which caused the sensation of suffocation even though he didn't technically need to breathe. Suddenly there was impact, and he shook his head, hoping that he'd fallen free of any hotspots that would drag him into something new.

The feeling that he couldn't breathe was worse, not better, and he realized it was because he'd wound up somewhere hot. Extremely hot.

Oh.

Hot, indeed. He gasped and his lungs burned, and as he drew the heat into himself, he was suddenly desperately, agonizingly aroused. This was not some unwelcome moment of tumescence that he could will away with a Gallifreyan mind trick. His entire body went rigid with an abrupt and overwhelming instinct to find and claim a mate, right this instant. Not just any mate. To find and claim Clara.

He could feel/hear the sounds of their lovemaking all around him, could feel echoes and fantasies of Clara breathing hard against the back of his neck. Panting, in passion. His sudden erection ached where it was trapped against his thigh back in the real world, and every hair on his body was standing on end.

He spun wildly, looking for a way out. He could feel her skin, brushing along his. Her nails, digging into his back. Her mouth, moving against his stomach. He cried out, but there was nothing substantial to escape. She was everywhere,  _they_  were everywhere, and they were clinging together in an endless churning of sexual desire and release.

He spun, and caught a glimpse of a fantasy Clara, glorious nudity concealed by his own half-undressed form, shoved up against a wall of the console room, one knee hooked high over his bare hip as he drove himself into her with unfettered urgency. Her head was thrown back, and he watched in horror as his own fantasy-self turned his head and sank his teeth into the valley where her throat met her shoulder.

Another turn, and there was Clara sprawled backward, and this time her body was on full display, though she had some garment rucked up over her hips and her blouse had been torn away to reveal her flushed breasts. Her legs were spread wide and she was literally begging for him to take her, and he tore his eyes away from the promise of ecstasy between her glistening thighs.

Desperate to get out of here, he flung himself into a spin around a different axis, hoping to find his way clear. Instead he found himself with a lap full of Clara, and this time though she was still mostly clothed, she was also determinedly attempting to get both of them into a state that was more agreeable to her. She was fumbling at his trousers, obscenities tumbling from her exquisite mouth, and within a second was sliding her small hand past his waistband, searching for a handful. The Doctor shoved her off his lap unceremoniously, the cacophony of his mounting arousal and panic making it difficult to think clearly about how to get himself out of this mess.

_Doctor!_

He heard her, the real her, his own actual Clara. She was distant, but it was enough to provide a compass point in this disorienting environment, and he shoved himself toward her, finally breaking free of the writhing limbs and impassioned moans.

He let himself drift for a moment, trying to get his bearings back, trying to calm himself before re-encountering the proper Clara. Unfortunately, though, she was moving toward him as well, and in a moment he felt her there, near him, undoubtedly noticing his flustered state and having some idea of where he must have found himself.

_Ah._

_Clara. I'm so sorry._  Those had been her dreams, all of them apart from the memories. The only dreams he had left her. The only thing that she could dream about, other than her missing lives.

She cut him off.  _Stop apologizing. Start fixing._

He couldn't go back in there. The whole thing was an utter mess. He didn't even fully understand how the mindless Time Lord consciousness left floating in his timestream had managed to construct something so vivid, so powerful.

 _I must have had a lot to work with,_  he mused absently.

 _That's no excuse,_  he reprimanded himself, and felt Clara scoff beside him. He'd forgotten that he wasn't alone.

He glanced over his shoulder, then regretted it as he caught another glimpse. There was some fantasy Clara, seated on (on!) the console panel, and he flushed as he realized that his own avatar was on his knees before her with his head buried between her thighs. Her hands were fisted in his hair, and she was screaming as she crested what was clearly one of too many climaxes that he'd been driving her to for hours.

Oh god.  _Oh god._  He realized what he'd done.

His own proper Clara was still beside him, and he felt her fingers twine through his as he had done back in the real world to pull her across the threshold of the TARDIS. He glanced over, and saw/felt her watching him.

 _That's not even your fantasy,_  he admitted, grudgingly.

_I know._

So she already knew. Already knew that he had fanned the flames of her desire by kludging his own mostly-ignored fantasies on top of hers, without doing much to try to turn down the volume of his unleashed Time Lord sexuality. It was amazing that she had stayed sane with that crashing around in her dreams.

And here she stood, offering him comfort as he realized just how badly he'd used her.

_I made a tool of myself and put myself in your hands. I couldn't have succeeded without the changes that you made. And then my sacrifice would have been for nothing. You wouldn't wish that on me, would you, Doctor?_

He was awestruck at the depths of Clara's genuine kindness and compassion. She had made this sacrifice for him, then she had lived with the mess he'd made of her since then, and now she stood beside him and  _comforted_  him.

The Doctor let himself come back to their bodies, and he raised his other hand in order to frame her face between his two. He opened his eyes, and with a gentle psychic nudge he prompted her to open hers as well.

"You are an angel, Clara Oswald. You are my angel. You do know that, don't you?"

Her smile was radiant, and he could feel warmth everywhere that their psyches were still bumped up against each other. What had he done to deserve this woman? He had no idea how he was going to take care of her as well as she deserved, but he planned to spend every day of the rest of her life ensuring her happiness in every way that he could think of.

And, because he was the Doctor, he could not move through this process without a rueful moment for the intensity of the grief that he would feel when he eventually lost her. It was a painful part of being the last Time Lord in a universe highly populated with mostly shorter-lived species available as suitable companions. This was why he typically ignored his attraction for his female friends. But the enormity of all that had happened with Clara up to this moment rendered all of that moot, absurd. He could deny her nothing, and he wanted her with all of his hearts.

And because they were still in contact, she felt all of this as he felt it, and she understood why she had it all wrong. Her being human no longer mattered to the Doctor. He was prepared to drop all pretenses with her and dive headfirst with her into any future that she wanted, on her terms. She needed only to say the words. She also felt the pre-grief of this moment for him, and understood the sadness that she so often saw in his eyes even during happy events.

They saw all of this unfold in each other's eyes and hearts and minds all at once, and the Doctor supposed that he should not have been at all surprised when he found Clara's mouth suddenly covering his.

He had barely had time to get the taste of her before he found himself devouring her mouth with a ferocity that seemed to appease both her and his own raging appetite. He slid his hands upward into her hair behind her ears, almost cradling her skull so that he could both deepen and slow the kiss to just where he wanted it.

It was astonishing, the degree to which kissing Clara in the dream that had brought him back here was exactly like kissing the actual girl. For all that Clara now understood the psychic world of a Time Lord better than any human ever born, she had no telepathic gift of her own. However it did turn out to be true that she knew how to open herself in a way that no human he'd kissed ever had, and he felt almost giddily triumphant when she let him all the way in with no hesitation and no ambivalence.

Then she was tearing away from him, pushing him away, and he had a sickening moment of terror that the end of his dream was about to repeat itself as well. But far from looking disgusted, she was staring at him with lust written openly on her face. Her knuckles were white as she gripped her own knees, trembling.

He sat back on his heel, lowering his hands as he attempted to compose himself. Well. That had been… unexpected. He briefly mourned the loss of the warm touch of her mind. Being in contact with her in that way had been… exquisite. He searched for a good response in spite of his spinning head.

"Clara… I'm sorry. I shouldn't have let you do that. I should have known that was too much, too soon."

He could hear her heart beating painfully against her ribs, could almost taste the rushing of her blood through her veins. The scent of her arousal hung so heavy in the air that it was difficult not to think about how slick her thighs must be beneath that brief little skirt she was wearing.

"I kissed you!"

He grinned. "Well. At least I was a little better prepared for it this time."

And then he almost winced at the quip. The real Clara had never kissed him before. Only an echo.

But the Victorian Clara certainly hadn't felt like an echo when her mouth had been plundering his, and after his tumble through the real Clara's psyche just now he was having an increasingly harder time thinking of her echoes as any less real than Clara herself.

She didn't seem offended, though, or was still too distracted by trying to get control over her raging hormones to even catch the slip. Speaking of which, he took a moment to slow his own pulse a bit closer to the vicinity of normal, to redirect some blood flow that had gotten off course.

Then he slowly laid his hands atop hers where they were clasped in her lap. With the skin contact he was able to give a direct nudge to her autonomic nervous system, helping her re-steady herself. They paused a moment in that tableau, until he finally stood up and gave her some space, sticking a finger in his collar to get a little breathing room as he did.

"So," she said eventually, only a little shakily. "Was that a success, would you say?"

He gave her an encouraging smile. "Only you can say. It seemed like we made some headway, but all that matters is how you feel."

She seemed to think about that, chewing her bottom lip for a moment with a faraway gaze. He could almost see her perusing the contents of her own head. After a moment, she shook it.

"I think so…" she said, a little uncertainly.

"The compulsion is lessened?" He rubbed his hands together, already setting up several processes in his brain to analyze everything he had found inside of Clara's psyche and plan out how to most effectively and efficiently finish clearing out all the redecorating he had done.

She picked at some invisible lint on her skirt. "Well, it's hard to be totally sure… the way that we ended did confuse the matter a bit. But yeah. I think it's… quieter. My head isn't screaming at me the way that it was. Not as loudly, anyway."

He tightened his jaw resolutely. "And your…" here he tried gesturing, but she raised an eyebrow at him and he admitted that he wasn't really getting his point across. "Your body?" It was awkward to ask her about her body. It meant that he was thinking about her body. Which he was finding himself doing much, much more than was really comfortable for him.

Clara ran her hands down the tops of her thighs to her knees. It wasn't a particularly provocative gesture, but he found his gaze fixed on her fingers nonetheless.

"It's… better," she affirmed. "Though that thing you did at the end also helped. You… turned it down yourself, when you held my hands."

"Yes," he agreed absently, crossing his arms and leaning a hip against the console.

After a moment, she looked up. "So, Doctor. What now? Do I just go home and have you pop off for a bit again? Come back next Wednesday? What does it mean to let you back into my life anyway?"

He spread his hands, anxious to know exactly that. "Why don't you come with me? I know we can't go back to how it was, act like it never happened. But does that mean we can't have any adventures?"

He knew he sounded like a little boy asking for candy before dinner, but he couldn't help himself. Ah, what a mess he had made of this whole thing. He'd reprogrammed Clara so that she would be endlessly smitten with him and him alone, and of course the effect had been that she'd kicked him out of her life for a year and now couldn't stand to get closer to him than five feet. Nice one, Doctor.

Clara was looking around the console room, and he saw how haunted she must have been this past year by the life that they'd started building before he bollixed the whole thing up.

"Well." Her voice was thoughtful, and he held his breath. "Just one adventure couldn't hurt, could it?"

He couldn't help it, he whooped out loud, and Clara's answering smile was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen in the universe.

"Just one question, first, Doctor?"

He froze in a ridiculous posture, then let his hands drop from wherever they'd wound up in space as he twirled around the console. "Yes?"

She stood up now and faced him squarely, a steely glint in her eye. " _Did_  you wait a year?"

Oh. Oh, right,  _that_. He shifted uncomfortably, hands fidgeting on the console as he avoided her gaze. "Practically," he mumbled.

"Practically?" Her voice rang out clearly, and he squirmed.

"Well, I waited until I had figured it out!" he defended himself. "Wasn't that the point?" Dear god, if he had gotten this far just to be thwarted again based on a technicality. He cursed Clara's superb maternal instincts and his own awkward difficulty lying about anything related to matters of the heart.

She didn't say anything, and he glanced at her out of the corner of his eyes, seeing her watching him with crossed arms.

"Well, wasn't it?" he reiterated, more loudly.

"How long?"

He shrugged with one shoulder and pulled at his collar. "I'mnotexactlysure."

"Doctor. You showed up on the correct date. You were actually counting for once. I know you."

He pushed a few buttons randomly and threw a lever, just to give himself a moment.

"Seven months," he admitted finally. "Seven months, five days, three hours and fifty-eight minutes, if you must know."

When he glanced over again, her lips were curved fondly. She uncrossed her arms and walked over to another panel of the console. "Well. It's better than I thought you'd do," she remarked casually, and for just one moment, she sounded like the old Clara.


	8. Chapter 8

He took her to Garavon 5, then to the cerulean beaches of the Holdran Nebula. It was possible that things did not go exactly, 100% to plan in terms of keeping it all low-key and relaxing, but Clara seemed to fall back into the rhythm of things - where by "things," he meant "running for her life" and "laughing in the face of death" - fairly quickly. His Clara. His brave, funny Clara.

For once he actually caught the change in mood before his companion had to announce it, and he realized that it was time to take her home. He set the TARDIS for its new destination without asking her, and he saw her notice and nod in some sort of satisfaction.

The TARDIS landed, and he wondered what he was supposed to do now. Walk her to her front door? Kiss her goodnight? He was badly out of practice at this entire courtship business, and his last mostly-human sweetheart had been a psychopathic, swashbuckling assassin, so he wasn't sure he should be taking his cues from that.

Then there was still the small matter that he had totally screwed up her brain and needed to take that into account in figuring out how to proceed.

Clara took the lead. She approached him where he had stalled out standing before one of the consoles, and she reached out and took his hands off the controls so that he was facing her.

He was aware of how he loomed over her, how tiny and fragile - and appealing - her body was next to his. Her petite hands were soft and cool, and he was relieved that hand-holding, at least, seemed to be back on the menu. She had even grabbed his hand twice when they were running on Garavon.

"Wednesday, then?" he asked awkwardly, looking down at their clasped hands like a schoolboy.

"Wednesday," she agreed, then squeezed his hands, let them go, and walked away.

* * *

Clara knew that he would no longer feel compelled to try to mark time with her, so she was pretty sure that he would be aiming the TARDIS for the next available Wednesday before she even hung up her coat. Ah, the Doctor. Always in a hurry.

She frowned to herself as she fingered her TARDIS key, which unbeknownst to him, had rested against her skin every day since the day that they had gone to Trenzalore.

She collapsed into her favorite overstuffed chair and closed her eyes. With one hand, she pinched the bridge of her nose, as if a headache were coming on, but the other hand was creeping in the opposite direction.

She couldn't believe she had kissed him. What had she been thinking?

Perhaps that she had spent hundreds or thousands of years kissing - and other things-ing - other men, and finally had the only one that she wanted in front of her, telling her that she could have anything she wanted from him.

But did she even believe him?

Oh, the Doctor would never lie to her on purpose.

Well, that was hogwash. The Doctor had happily lied to her, on purpose, all the time. Clara had even come to accept that… you did, when you ran with the Doctor, or you didn't stay long.

But he wouldn't lie to her on purpose about  _this_. He meant it, and she didn't even have to trust him. He'd been inside her head and she'd felt what he felt about her, and damned if he hadn't convinced her that the enormity of what she had done on Trenzalore changed everything for him.

So what did that change for her?

Her lower hand had wandered quite far during her musings, and she found her fingers searching for some magical, instant stress relief. Her mind wandered back to that moment when she had "found" the Doctor, stranded in her psyche near the seething morass of sexual obsession that he'd built out of her (and his) fantasies. It wasn't exactly what she  _wanted_  to think about at the moment, intensely embarrassing as it had been. She just didn't really have much choice.

It wasn't even as if she could possibly have any doubts about how badly he wanted her… his own sexual fantasies of her had been woven into her own, and she knew the contents of her own, so his sort of stood out. Not a lot of girls got so much material to go on when contemplating the object of their affections. But then, not a lot of girls got ripped into shreds and scattered across the space-time continuum as a display of their devotion, so she supposed it was fair that she got  _something_  out of it.

Honestly, in all this time, she had shied away from the parts of her post-Trenzalore libido that he'd constructed out of his own desires. Of course they always surfaced on the occasions when she just couldn't keep her hand out of her knickers no matter how hard she tried to distract herself… once she'd cracked open the floodgates, or they eventually cracked themselves open, she had no meaningful control over what came through.

So she'd already seen herself in a variety of compromising positions not of her own invention, and as far as she could tell, the Doctor had a much, much dirtier mind then he let on, with all his flailing and blushing. By Clara's reckoning, Time Lord sexuality in general was intensely romantic in a way that didn't quite translate to humans… it was hard to avoid, when every sexual encounter involved some degree of psychic intimacy. It wasn't that all mating between Time Lords was necessarily the equivalent of a marriage, but it was quite a bit more like that than for humans.

Actually, she suspected that there were ways that the Doctor was sometimes more casual about sex with humans than his companions ever saw… without telepathy on the part of his partner, sex  _could_  be casual in a way that it was not with his own people. But given how deeply he allowed himself to love his companions, he'd always kept the two (almost) completely separated. Occasional humans, humans who he did not love, could be for sex, and obviously River had been a category unto herself, but companions and friends were not. And to keep the boundaries neat, he mostly kept his rare forays well concealed.

But Clara, Clara had an inside line. It had left her with absolutely no doubt about the intensity of the Doctor's attraction to her long before Trenzalore. In fact, she felt deeply aware of his particular propensities - for going down on his partners, for sex in illicit or unexpected places, she even had some idea about his affection for playing Time Lord mind games with his lovers. And she even had details about the ways that he'd daydreamed of playing out those propensities with her in particular.

He was obsessed with her thighs. With wondering how many times he could make her orgasm before she begged him to stop. With any idea that included Clara on her knees. Among other things.

… aaaand it was about to be too late to avert the inevitable. Clara felt her climax coming much too late to yank her hand out of her knickers and try to find something on the telly. She bit down on her lip hard enough to draw blood, refusing to cry out his name even in the privacy of her own home.

Spent, Clara wondered if a year had really been long enough.

* * *

Again, the Doctor hoped that upon hearing the TARDIS materialize, maybe Clara would come to him, like she used to. And again, the Doctor was out of luck. He was either going to have to slog his way back up that endless bloody stairwell, or he was going to have to sit here in his little box twiddling his thumbs and pretending to be occupied. He didn't think his bruised ego could take the latter.

Anyway, some part of him knew with uncharacteristic wisdom that this was no time for games, and when there was no knock and no Clara within a few moments, he swallowed his pride and began the climb.

It was as he was knocking on her door that he first feared that something was wrong. He couldn't put a finger on it - contact telepathy had its limitations, often happily so - but something inside of Clara's apartment was just not right.

He listened at the door, breathing in at the gap to see if any useful information was in the air.

Sex.

Not happy sex.

But only Clara. No one else's scent.

He knocked again, louder. He tried to wait, but he was worried. Not that human masturbation was supposed to be dangerous or anything, he understood, but given recent events he was a little concerned.

After a moment he soniced the door and cracked it open. "Clara?" he called from the doorway, peeking in. She wasn't in the living area, but he noted her coat and bag hanging in their customary location.

With no response, the Doctor crept in, unwilling to assume that all was well. That was when he heard her moan. It was low, too low for even his Time Lord hearing to have caught from the hallway.

He should turn around, leave her some privacy. But he couldn't. Not when the scent of distress hung in the air as thick as the scent of lust. He noticed that she had an old-fashioned (by now) answering machine installed on her landline, and the light was blinking rapidly, as if she'd not relieved it of its messages for many days.

There was only one closed door and it was obviously the bedroom. Clara's bedroom. Fortunately his apprehension forestalled any illicit thoughts or feelings that the notion might otherwise arouse.

The moaning continued as he gingerly crossed to the door, sonic still in hand. The sound was low and, frankly, she sounded drained, possibly ill. He knocked lightly, braced for the intense awkwardness of what was about to come but feeling great guilt and responsibility for the mess he had made of Clara's sexuality.

No response to his knock, not even a pause in her muted cries. That concerned him more than anything, and he tried the knob, cracking the door reluctantly.

The room was dark, the curtains drawn, and the scent was heavy in the air. Without the doorway between them, her sounds were much more like actual crying than masturbatory moaning. More like a wounded animal.

To hell with it. The Doctor swung open the door. "Clara?"

She was laying face down, her head turned to the side, and it was clear that she was up to exactly what it had sounded like. Part of his brain noticed her unusual position… Time Lords didn't tend to masturbate, but if they did, they were much more likely to do so in this position than the more-usual human preference of laying on their backs. But that detail was swept away by the rest of the situation.

"Clara." His voice was louder now as he moved toward the bed and unceremoniously flipped her and pulled her into his arms.

Her eyelids fluttered and he saw only a fleeting spark of recognition of his presence. She was naked, tangled in the sheets, and had obviously been covered in layers of sweat for days. He gathered her up, repeating her name and sonicing her vitals.

Okay. Physically stable, anyway, except for a high but not dangerous fever and an overloaded autonomic nervous system. No immediate threat there.

But her hands were grasping at him now, mindlessly, pulling him toward her, as the flustered Doctor tried to both evade her groping and handle the situation. He dropped his screwdriver on the bed and grabbed her face with both hands, immediately damping her sexual responses before trying to figure out what the hell else was going on.

Clara went instantly limp in his arms and her moans ended as if he'd flipped a switch. Which, technically, he had.

He closed his eyes to concentrate, regretting invading her mind without permission given their recent history but frantic to figure out how to help her. It was a jumble in there, but it was clear that she'd been abed for days - dear god, he hoped not for the entire week - gripped in some sort of fever. Had he caused this, by his initial attempt at cleaning up after himself? He didn't see how he could of, but here she was, and there was nothing normal about whatever was happening.

 _Clara?_  He kept it gentle, a nudge.

There was a faint stirring, but it was clear that Clara was far too exhausted to respond directly. She was still adrift deep in the vault where she'd attempted to lock down her libido, but fortunately the Doctor was able to reach in far enough to gently guide her back to him without paying too much attention to the environment himself.

It was simply not clear to him what had driven her to such a state, and he resigned himself that there would be no answers until Clara had gotten some sort of rest. He couldn't really put her back to bed in this state, though - his fastidious companion would have been appalled.

With unusual care for the details, the Doctor was able to sling an arm around her and get her into the bathroom. Her head lolled bonelessly and there was little consciousness online, but her body seemed to be making some uncoordinated attempts to work with him, and he was able to get her into some warm water and sponge the dried sweat - and other fluids - from her body. For his own sanity, he pointedly ignored the fact that he was maneuvering and washing a nude Clara, and determinedly pretended that some unhelpful part of his brain wasn't taking in every tiny detail, down to the last pointy elbow and beauty mark.

He hated his brain some days.

He didn't dare to try to clean her hair, but he wet it and brushed out the tangles with the sure hands of a man who had done it before, securing it at the nape of her neck with a clip that he found in a drawer. Then he turned up the heat (ignoring the thermostat and cheating with his screwdriver) and left her on the couch under a soft, fuzzy blanket before he went about the oddly domestic tasks of stripping the sheets from her bed and airing out her bedroom.

By the time he was done with that, he was thinking about how to get some food and water into her when he found her full asleep and snoring gently on the couch. Picking her up in his arms again, he moved her back into her newly-fresh bed and tucked her in - the third time since he'd met her, and every time but the first he'd done the job with a heavy, fearful heart.


	9. Chapter 9

When Clara woke, she was parched. Parched like she had never had a molecule of water in her life. She turned her head weakly and saw both a glass of water and a half-filled pitcher on the bedside table, and managed a rueful smile. She felt clean sheets against her skin, and she was wearing some sort of slip, neither of which had been true the last that she could recall. Evidently being put to bed by the Doctor was becoming some sort of a habit.

She found that even with her best efforts she just didn't seem to have the strength to reach the glass, and she managed to fumble both a box of tissues and a novel to the floor in her attempt. She gave up, exhausted, as the Doctor quietly came around from where he'd been sitting, picked up the water, and sat on the edge of the bed beside her to help her drink.

She collapsed, letting him hold the water to her lips. He put a hand on the back of her neck to help steady her, and even as she closed her eyes at the relief of the sweet, sweet water running over her dry tongue and down her tight throat, she also felt a wave of dread as her body immediately started to wake back up at the Doctor's touch.

"No," she groaned, pushing him away after only a swallow. Even water wasn't worth going through that hell again.

"Clara?" His voice was worried, confused.

She tried to roll away from him on the bed and couldn't believe how little strength she had at this point. Oi, how long had it been? Years?

"I can't…" she managed, not very coherently. "Don't touch me." Her voice cracked from disuse.

"Clara, what happened?" Ignoring her words, he reached out and placed his hand on her arm. She started to yank away, but melted back into the sheets instead when she felt the mental nudge that meant that he was manipulating something inside of her – funny that she'd come to be familiar with that feeling now – and her body's insane, urgent thrumming subsided again before it could start to overwhelm her.

"Oh, god, thank you," she groaned, too traumatized to try to protect her dignity. She just wanted it to stop, and he had stopped it, and that was good enough for her for the moment.

He offered her more water and she accepted gratefully. It took more than a moment for Clara to slowly slake her thirst, afraid that if she drank more than a sip at a time that she would throw up. She struggled back to coherency. He didn't even seem impatient, for once, just holding the glass until she could do it for herself and then sitting beside her until she was ready to talk, leaving his hand on her arm to continue to dampen her haywire nervous system.

She pushed back some strands of hair that had come free of her ponytail in her sleep. "Well," she said finally. "That's all quite embarrassing."

The Doctor put the water back on the nightstand. He was sitting very still. "It's my fault, not yours, Clara. You have nothing to be embarrassed about."

She didn't feel particularly inclined to argue with him. She was frankly exhausted and humiliated, and now that the Doctor was back in her life, she just wanted this part to be over.

"We need to get some food into you," he suggested next.

He brought her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a glass of milk, which made Clara feel like a child, but she had to admit it did the trick with regards to her blood sugar. He was uncharacteristically silent and still as she slowly ate, then managed to prop herself up into a sitting position. She could feel a bit of strength returning.

"So," Clara ventured finally, wiping her mouth with a napkin that he'd provided with her plate. "That was all bad."

The Doctor looked grim. "What happened?"

She gave a little half-shrug with one shoulder. "Well, honestly, I'm not exactly sure." Clara searched her cloudy memory for clues. "I, uh, generally try to avoid that sort of thing. It… it doesn't actually help, and it's not a pleasant experience anyway. But I thought…" Clara trailed off, cheeks warming.

The Doctor's hand was still resting on her wrist, and he squeezed lightly. "You thought…?"

Clara couldn't meet his eyes. "I thought that I had figured out how to replicate what you did last week on my own. I just… once I could tell that it was actually a little better, I was just so impatient to keep making progress." She picked at some invisible lint on the sheet.

The Doctor's expression was pained. "And then you got stranded."

"I guess so." Clara paused. "I guess I really shouldn't have gone in… there. I just… I thought maybe I could make some headway, and then… everything would be easier between us, when you came back."

The Doctor's smile was sad. "Clara, I have to admit that I've been a little surprised at how much damage control you've been able to do on your own in the past year, and I see now that, being the clever girl that you are, you've retained an impressive amount of what you learned in your lifetime as a telepath." His voice got a little tighter as he said the last part, still clearly emotional at the thought that Clara could remember Gallifrey. "But in spite of all that, you are human, you know. You could have gotten into even more trouble than you did."

"I know." She was frustrated. "But what am I supposed to do? Just sit around and wait for you to fix it all?"

He didn't answer right away, and she could see he was weighing how to respond. When he spoke, his words emerged slowly. "Well. If you're… impatient, there is something we could try. But I don't know if it's a good idea. If I'm wrong, it could make things worse. Well, not  _worse_ , per se, but… well, it  _could_  be worse."

Clara looked up at him. "What is it?"

He was blushing and avoiding her gaze. "Well, I could probably just sort of… neutralize the glamour, instead of trying to deconstruct it. Tearing it down without tearing out parts of your own mind is delicate work, that's why it's so slow. But we could just sort of… rewrite the whole thing at once instead. But it would require a different… technique."

He was talking around something. "And that technique is…?" she prompted.

He took a deep breath. "Corrective experience."

Clara's eyes narrowed. "Just spit it out, Doctor. What does that mean?"

He made himself meet her eyes. "Well, think about it. All that stuff up locked away up there is just fantasy, right? That's what I used to fuel the compulsion. But if fantasy got overwritten with reality… reality would trump, wouldn't it? Much faster than unravelling the fantasy by hand."

Clara goggled at him. "You mean you could shag it out of me? Are you serious?"

The Doctor shifted uncomfortably. "I don't mean to be presumptuous, Clara. But you did ask. And it wouldn't have to be… that."

She found that she was touched by how apologetic his tone was at the suggestion. And how presumptuous was he really being, anyway? If Clara was honest with herself, wasn't it by now sort of a given where this whole thing was going anyway?

Maybe it was. But like that?

* * *

The Doctor felt like he hadn't had to school himself to patience so often in centuries. He was absolutely committed to this thing with Clara - whatever it turned out to be - but emotional delicacy wasn't exactly his strong suit. His marriage with River had gone so well in part because she had just bullied him into it. When their physical relationship had "started" from his perspective, she'd been quite the dominatrix. By the time it'd been his turn to seduce River's younger selves, he had a confidence that came from decades of experience with her body. Their reversal in time, as tragic as it had been in ways, was also a large part of how River Song had managed to get the Doctor into bed.

But Clara had no such advantage. He just was going to have to be careful here at the outset. Though he didn't consider it a strong suit, he was discovering that the bizarre combination of her vulnerability and her defiance was heady stuff for his own libido.

She took a long time considering his proposal. He couldn't really break the contact between them without unleashing the glamour again, which kept him from fidgeting and distracting her.

Finally Clara looked up. "Okay. Let's do it." Her face was smooth of expression.

The Doctor blinked. Just like that, she was announcing that they were going to have sex. And he really couldn't tell how she felt about it, not without peeking.

He cleared his throat. "You're quite the romantic, aren't you, Clara Oswald?"

Clara actually laughed at that, and the Doctor felt an answering smile. "I have a practical problem, Doctor," she pointed out. "This is a practical solution, right? Maybe we should put off worrying about the rest of it all until we've made sure that you're not going to leave me in a mindless sexual frenzy for the next week." Her cheeks were red but her words were firm.

He stroked her arm. "You  _are_  a practical girl, Clara, and that's part of what I love about you." He saw her eyes widen slightly at his casual use of the word, but he was determined to be transparent about his own feelings, knowing this would all be easier on her if he wasn't his usual, bizarrely cagey self. "But I'm afraid that I have a stake in this too, you know. I think we can take a moment to make sure that we give the occasion its due."

Clara tilted her head. "Okay. What do you mean?"

The Doctor caught her gaze and held it. "I mean, my dear, that you need more rest and more food before you're actually recovered from your recent ordeal. And I mean that I'm not taking you to bed without taking you out on a decent date first. I'm not a cad, you know."

There was a heat between them in spite of his damping of her nervous system, and he knew that that was just their genuine attraction reminding them both that the glamour was not the only thing pulling them together. Clara looked a little nervous, and the Doctor found it strangely reassuring to remember that he did actually know how to court a stunning woman like Clara when he put his mind to it.

"Okay," she said in an unusually meek voice. "So you want me to…?"

Ah. This was better. Finally the Doctor was getting a modicum of control over the whole situation.

"I want you to go back to bed. And when you wake back up, I want you to eat a light snack, take a long bath, and put on your most amazing dress for me. Can you do that, Clara?"

He could feel her pulse beneath her fingers. It wasn't racing madly, just a light gallop that flattered his ego. "And what about you?" she asked next.

"I'm going to stay here to keep an eye on your while you rest," he told her. "When you wake up, I'm going to head back to the TARDIS, as I think I need to get my black tie to the cleaners if I'm going to be presentable. Then you come to the TARDIS when you're ready, and I'm going to take you to the stars for the evening of your life before we implement our 'practical solution' to your 'practical problem'." His voice was wry with innuendo, and he was pleased by the trusting way that Clara was finally letting him take the lead, as well as her obvious nervous anticipation.

She bit her lip, and he looked forward to biting it as well, much later this evening.

"I suppose we have a plan then," Clara said finally, and the Doctor grinned in satisfaction.


	10. Chapter 10

He was down below, sorting fussily through the wardrobe after it had held out against him, hiding his second cufflink, for a comically long contest of wills. He heard Clara rap on the door of the TARDIS, and he smiled as he heard the door swing itself open… he was gratified that his girls were getting along so swimmingly, now that the TARDIS had apparently forgiven Clara for being impossible.

He almost danced up the steps to the main level, eager to show off how well he could be dressed up. What he forgot was that Clara might have dressed to make an impression as well.

And what an impression. The Doctor froze, transfixed.

Of course the dress wasn't actually Gallifreyen. It was an unusual dress by human standards, but the Doctor immediately understood why Clara had been attracted to it. He'd never much cared for the garb of his home world; he'd adopted human fashions early in his long life. But the high collar combined with the deeply plunging neckline, the lines at the breast and waist, and the elegant asymmetrical drape, well, it was all very reminiscent of a dress that a Time Lady might have worn for a night out on the town. And as it so happened, the color of his people was Clara's favorite, so of course it was a bright ruby red, with darker garnet accent panels.

In addition Clara had pinned up her hair in an elaborate kind of twist that he remembered seeing on girls of his own people when he was young. Clara had truly brought her own exquisite taste to the most flattering fashions of the world he shared with one of her echoes.

The Doctor approached her with open admiration, wondering if she had dressed so evocatively merely because she thought he would be attracted to it, or if it had some coded meaning as well.

"You… are… splendid," he drew out slowly, taking her hand and turning her on the spot.

She lifted her chin as she executed a graceful turn. "You're not bad yourself, Chin-boy." She seemed comfortable with Oswin's words in her mouth.

He took her to a restaurant where they seemed to float among the stars, as course after course of the finest delicacies of a dozen different worlds melted in their mouths. The Doctor explained the contents of each dish and Clara was charmed by the entertaining stories that he relayed about many of the alien foods. She occasionally presented some random bit of knowledge of her own gleaned from one of her lives among the stars, and the ease with which she did so fascinated the Doctor. He sat close enough to keep his fingers resting against her hand for most of the evening, keeping a subtle pressure on her nervous system that kept it from running away from her in such close proximity to him.

They shared multiple bottles of champagne, but no matter how many times the Doctor refilled Clara's flute he knew that she would only maintain a mild, heady buzz. The third course was a cold, fruit-filled soup - it sounded bizarre, but tasted incomparably delicious - that Clara compared to a similar dish served on a particular holiday on Gallifrey.

The Doctor found himself studying Clara closely, and when she noticed she gave him a self-conscious smile. "Does it bother you?" she asked, pushing some soup around in her bowl for a moment.

"Bother me? No," he answered quickly, allowing his fingers to move over the skin of her wrist. "Actually, I quite like hearing you talk about Gallifrey. Tell me, what do you remember best?"

Clara thought about it a moment with a faraway look. "What I remember in the most detail would definitely be the children. I taught, in that lifetime, and many others. I told you that I can't remember my husband's name, but I remember the names of some of the children I taught. Apeiron, Chesperl. They were twin boys. There was a girl named Arkytior. She was like my own daughter."

The Doctor's smile was both sad and delighted at the same time. "That was a popular name in my youth. It was my granddaughter's name." A pained shadow passed over his face. "In High Gallifreyan, it means rose. Funny, I never thought about that."

"The same as the other human girl you fell in love with, in your last life. Rose Tyler."

The Doctor stared at her. "I've… never mentioned Rose to you."

Clara reached for a piece of sweet bread to sop up the soup in the bottom of her bowl. "I know. I met her, though, for a moment, once. And you -  _that_  you - well,  _he_. He loved her very much. There were dreams of her inside of your timestream, wherever your last self was. Dreams of  _Bad Wolf_  too."

It was funny. The Doctor had been so focused on helping Clara, that perhaps he had not been paying enough attention to how strong she was, how much she knew now. He felt exposed.

She was smiling at him, and her smile made him nervous. She was smiling like she knew what he was thinking.

"The music, too," she said abruptly, picking back up the previous thread of their conversation about Gallifrey. They wound up talking for hours as they grazed their way through so many courses that they both lost count.

After dinner he took her dancing, at a tiny, dimly-lit nightclub that had a markedly French ambiance to it in spite of the fact that it was definitely not on Earth. The constant contact allowed him to suppress Clara's glamour, and the extended physical closeness allowed both of them to gently sink into their body's natural reactions to one another.

He pulled her flush against him and leaned in to breathe in the clean fragrance of her neck. Her hands were twined at the nape of his neck, and occasionally her fingers moved across his skin teasingly. They were sinking into a trance of warm, relaxed anticipation, facilitated by the liquor, his telepathy, or perhaps just the magic of a rare, perfect evening running among the stars.

He made sure to sweep her back to the TARDIS before she began to grow exhausted, leading her with a hand at the small of her back to her old quarters. He could feel both of their hearts drumming with a little extra force, and the Doctor was finding himself distracted by the intensity of his hunger for what was coming.

The door had just slid shut behind them when the Doctor turned Clara immediately in the circle of his arms and brought their mouths together, as aggressively as her Victorian echo had once wrenched a kiss from him. Again Clara welcomed his psychic caress as eagerly as she did his mouth, and he found that he had to be far less careful than he usually did with a human lover, as Clara knew exactly what to expect from his touch.

In fact, she was somehow reciprocating, as if years of familiarity alone could allow a human mind to recreate some form of telepathy of its own. At any rate, she was as much inside of him as he was inside of her, and he had not yet pulled her into himself with his own hands.

They both groaned loudly into one another's mouths, and the Doctor found himself gripped with the urgency of getting some of her clothes off of her body. The dress's plunging neckline gave way easily and he suddenly found himself with a handful of Clara's bare breast as well as the feel of her hot, open mouth under his.

The psychic feedback loop that enhanced intimacy so much was practically weaving itself between them. The Doctor had learned how to complete his partner's side of the loop from the outside over his various encounters with human lovers, but Clara's heart and mind were so open, her mounting arousal was so focused and available to him, her ability to move with his guidance was so nimble, that they were locked into a perfect upward spiral of lust in seconds.

He broke the kiss, tearing his mouth away from hers with an effort, locking his eyes with hers and thrilled at the sight of the hot desire in her gaze, knowing she could see it mirrored in his own.

"You know how this works, don't you, Clara?" His voice was slightly hoarse.

The side of Clara's mouth turned up in an extremely sexy fashion. "I suppose that we'll need to take a bit of time to make sure that my body can be ready for you. But don't worry, Doctor. It's not going to be a problem."

Her words inflamed him, and he cocked an eyebrow at her warningly, then raised one hand toward her bare sternum. He laid the pad of his middle finger lightly against her skin, about the most minimal contact he could establish.

But she gasped as the feedback loop snapped shut between them again. He was no longer fully suppressing the glamour either, just keeping a cap on it so that it didn't overwhelm her. She arched her back, pushing forward toward his touch and causing her exposed breasts to shift higher over her ribcage.

The Doctor quickly located the pathways that he was looking for, and smiled in satisfaction at Clara's second gasp of surprise as her hands began to move under his direction. He ran her fingers sensually over her shoulders and throat and then, finally, down to caress the swell of her breast, all just with the touch of his single fingertip.

Clara was staring at him, panting hard now, enthralled, just the way her wanted her. He backed her up to the bed, then pushed her back, letting the contact go again. She sprawled on the duvet before him.

"Take off the dress," the Doctor ordered, and Clara complied with shaking hands. The Doctor reached up and casually undid his bowtie and the top couple of buttons of his shirt as he watched her releasing the various closures that gave her garment its structure.

The thing sort of fell open around her so that she was laying in a puddle of rich red fabric. She was frankly glorious, by standards human or Time Lord. She wore only a pair of bright red knickers, and he couldn't help but wonder if she had deliberately extracted that from his own fantasies. She was a striking image, with her pale skin and dark hair.

He again felt a wave of being exposed in a way that could not remember ever feeling before. He had come to want this woman so badly that it was driving him out of his mind, and she was displaying an ability to push his buttons, post-Trenzalore, that made it impossible to keep a level head. It seemed to be bringing out in him a strong urge to possess her in a way that he hadn't felt in many lifetimes, that he didn't know that he  _could_  feel with a human mate.

But then, she wasn't exactly just human anymore, was she?

He knelt over her on the bed, still mostly dressed, and trailed his fingers over her bare stomach. They reconnected with a spark like static electricity, and they both simultaneously hitched their breaths… Clara was nearly wild with desire, her entire body begging for touch, for stimulation. He closed his eyes and took a moment to take the reigns of her entire body, just to let her feel the extent of what he was capable of. There was an intense peak in her arousal, and he savored the sensations of her painfully tight nipples, the aching between her legs.

Now Clara was arching up into his touch from her wanton splay on the bed, and the Doctor was strangely driven by the urge to actually be inside her. It was a rare impulse, for him, as he tended to be more stimulated by the mindgames of playing with his lover's desires than by getting to traditional sex as quickly as possible. But there was something about the way that Clara was so unexpectedly engaging the Time Lord side of his sexuality that seemed to also be bringing out in him an uncharacteristically human drive to rut.

Add into the mix that Clara's glamour was feeding into their psychic loop and he was beginning to feel sexually out of control in a way that he couldn't quite get a handle on, and he found himself falling down over Clara's body and sliding his hand immediately between her thighs. He felt triumphant when his fingers confirmed what he'd already known, that her thighs were extraordinarily slick and her knickers utterly sodden.

With no further ado he slipped his fingers beneath the waistband of her knickers and sought downward, inward. She helpfully wiggled her hips and started shucking her knickers downward as well, freeing his hand between her thighs. They were kissing roughly now as his fingers plunged into her body, two fingers and then, after only a few thrusts, three, as he was already impatient to make sure that she was ready to let him inside of her, instead of taking his time about it, like he should have been.

No matter, his Impossible Girl was with him all the way, exquisitely responsive to his every move and relaxing her body and her mind to his wildness in a way that felt intoxicatingly submissive, yes, but was anything but passive. Somehow her knickers seemed to be off - she had some sort of hidden superpower, he decided.

That was good, as he was suddenly sitting back on his heel and removing his braces, not exactly in a hurry but with a good deal of determination. In his hyperfocused mode he was able to get his trousers down around his hips without any fumbling. His erection was in his hand before he realized that he had no idea when he'd started permitting his body to respond, but obviously it'd been a while and he hadn't been paying attention.

He was positioning himself between her thighs, and he could feel her hurrying along for him, knowing what was coming. He couldn't remember the last time he'd entered a human woman without doing her the favor of making sure she climaxed at least twice first, to ensure that she would be ready for him. He didn't know if it was on purpose that Clara was obviously driving herself as close to the brink as she could get by the time he got into position, her fingers rubbing frantically against herself while he maneuvered. Sure enough, though, he was able to push directly into her despite his ungentlemanly hurry, and she climaxed with his first stroke, the sudden spasm helping her body accept him.

From there he started to lose track, as there was a vast amount of skin contact between them now - his shirt was all the way unbuttoned (was that more of Clara's superpower?), and he could feel her smooth torso against his. All the touch drew him deep into her psyche, where he began to weaken the walls of vault where her glamour was locked away. In a way it was helpful that things between them had spiraled so far out of control, as the real, undistorted experience they were having was certainly giving them a sort of weapon of mass destruction with which to neutralize the constructs inside.

The Doctor's mouth moved hungrily over Clara's flawless lily-white skin, leaving red marks against the column of her throat. His hands seemed huge against her petite body as he stroked her curves from breast to waist, then began to tease the taut peak of her nipple. The combination of sensations along with the loop - she felt his fingers tweaking her aching nipple at the same time as she felt her nipple under his clever fingers, she felt the delicious, unceremonious invasion of her body at the same time as she felt his ecstasy at driving himself into her in his mad search for completion.

He lost track of how many times Clara climaxed as he drove relentlessly toward his own. Every once in a while one of their mouths would find the other, and there would be another extended round of deep, slow kissing. Between that, he tasted her skin, her ear, her clavicle, her shoulder, her wrist. At one point Clara's mouth found his own nipple and he felt her sharp little teeth drag across the sensitive nub, and with a hiss of outrage he reversed their positions, drawing the pebbled peak of her own nipple into his scalding hot mouth and sucking fiercely enough to bruise her fragile human flesh.

In fact, he found himself marking her from ear to knee, with his teeth, with suction against her alabaster skin, even with his fingers on her narrow hips. Clara's nails dug into his back, into his shoulders, and it made him arch into her all the harder. He was swelling, now, inside of her, getting ready to finish, and it turned out she had the right of it when she told him that keeping up with him wasn't going to be a problem for her. She clung to him and almost began mewling as he swelled, her own fingers caught strategically between their bodies as she continued pushing herself through subsequent orgasms even as he finally achieved his.

 _Finally?_  It'd been minutes, where it should have been hours. What right did he have to think of it as finally? He grabbed Clara's knee, yanked it high over his hip in order to give himself the deepest possible access of her body, and angled himself to thrust with all of his weight. Clara was releasing a full-voice shriek as he began to orgasm, and the final swelling of his erection and the release of copious amounts of his fluids deep inside of Clara's body was accompanied by the Doctor's long groan through his clenched teeth and his eyes rolling back in his head.

He collapsed on top of Clara, wrapping his arms around her bare shoulders and letting himself revel in the incredible expanse of her skin against his as he finished twitching his way through the final phase of his orgasm. He buried his face in her silky hair, cradling her skull in his hands as he felt her final cries against his shoulder.

They both lay like that for several minutes, catching their breath slowly and letting themselves drift back from the wild mindlessness of their coupling. The Doctor's swollen erection softened gradually, and he braced himself in a position where he could prop most of his weight on the bed instead of Clara while he waited for her body to release him. She was soft and warm in his arms, her face relaxed in the aftermath of their lovemaking, and the Doctor felt like they were cocooned in another world where nothing mattered but keeping Clara as close as possible.

Eventually he felt himself slip free of Clara's body, and he reached down and tucked himself into a comfortable position. He rolled onto his back and pulled her under his arm to press her face against his chest.

"Mmm. Doctor," he eventually heard her mumble against his ribcage.

The Doctor cleared his throat lightly. "Are you okay?"

He first felt the smile that he could not see, though she then lifted her head to peer up at him. Her smile was shy more than smug - so different than River - and he was quickly becoming enchanted with the mix of wantonness and sweetness that Clara brought to bed.

"You mean in spite of your rush?" Her words were still fuzzy, her eyes unfocused.

The Doctor felt himself blushing. Usually he left the blushing and flailing behind by the time he made it to this point… he wasn't actually as flustered by his own sexuality as he seemed, but allowing his discomfort with human sexuality to show often with his companions helped to keep up the walls that he usually tried to maintain. At the moment, though, he was genuinely embarrassed.

"That was… unlike me," he offered eventually.

Clara seemed charmed for some reason, then she looked more serious, her fingers tracing a light pattern over his bare chest. "Are  _you_  okay?"

It was a fair question. He didn't fully understand the intensity of his aggression with Clara. Certainly previous humans lovers had reported that intimacy with a Time Lord tended to be an overwhelming experience, but usually not in quite that way.

"I… I'm fine, actually, just a little… taken aback. I meant to be gentler with you."

Many strands of her hair had been pulled free of her twist and fell across her eyes like a curtain. She looked exactly as freshly shagged as she actually was, and he felt a stirring. "Shall I take it as a compliment?" she asked, punctuating the question with a kiss on his collarbone.

He looked down at her seriously. "Actually, yes. You should."

Ironically, for all her wild responsiveness during their coupling, she seemed a little less disoriented in the aftermath than he had expected. He ran a hand down her spine, both enjoying her skin but also deliberately checking for the subtle feeling of pressure that her glamour caused.

He was relieved by how lessened it was. Clara seemed to realize what he was doing.

"It worked," she said, halfway a question, and he nodded agreement. She responded by lowering her head and cuddling back into his side, and he pulled her tight against him again. He found himself considering rolling her back over and actually taking some time to play with her this time, to give her a better idea of what he was capable of doing to her. It was then that he noticed that her hand was shifting slightly against his hip, where it was caught between their two bodies.

He flattened his hand against her back, splaying out his fingers, and used the touch to find the pathways he wanted again. It was exhilarating, how easy she made it for him. He closed his eyes and sank into the sensations of both her moving fingers and her slick folds beneath them. Clara must have felt what he was doing, as her fingers slowed for a moment self-consciously, and he responded by urging them back up to speed.

He was gratified by Clara's gasp as she slid a finger inside of herself. For him, in ways, this was even better than touching a woman himself. He loved the heady mix of panic, surrender and arousal as he moved through her own nervous system.

She shifted her hips, maneuvering the juncture of her thighs more firmly against his leg so that she was pressing herself against him as well as her own hand. She was shameless, was Clara. He felt her relax her fingers into his control instead of fighting him, and he shivered in pleasure as he slid a second finger inside of her.

Clara moaned low against his side. To all appearances the Doctor was laying still with his eyes closed while Clara was picking back up where they had left off on her own, but of course that was not what was happening at all.

He bit his lower lip slightly in concentration. "Clara, you are so impossibly tight. I have no idea how you managed to take what you just did in spite of my hurry."

She had surrendered her fingers to him entirely, but was managing to show her enthusiasm by the force with which she rocked her hips against him. Her voice was breathy as she answered. "This isn't my first rodeo either, Doctor. I've learned exactly what this body is capable of over many, many years."

Of course. She may have only spent twenty-some years in it so far, but she'd spent thousands of years in it in her memories. Clara clearly had a command of her body that far outstripped her age.

"But I can feel you right now," he continued, fascinated by the subject. "Your… you are like a vice grip and there's only two fingers inside you right now." He turned those two fingers inside of her wet heat, feeling the walls of her passage clamped down.

She hitched up even further on her side, sliding her top leg over one of his so that he could feel every thrust. He opened his eyes and found her gazing up at him smolderingly. "I have always liked quite a bit more… penetration than the average girl," Clara whispered huskily. "I told you that you wouldn't be a problem for me."

He felt a wave of both lust and jealousy sweep over him at the implications of her words. He looked forward to discovering at great length and in great detail just how much penetration Clara could withstand, but he found himself irate at the idea that she might have a wealth of knowledge on the topic already. It surprised him… River had made no secret of just how many blocks she had been around sexually, and he had only found it reassuring with her. But Clara, somehow, was coming to feel like she belonged to him, and he found that he didn't like the idea of sharing her, even in the past.

Almost without noticing he found himself folding her ring finger in with her middle and index as she continued to fuck herself against his side. Clara noticed, though, a low keen coming out of her as she was stretched a second time. He probed through her nervous system and felt just how sore she was after a round of intercourse.

It made him want to do it again, to punish her. For ever having been with another man.

_Whoa, Doctor. Down boy, indeed._

… the glamour that he'd constructed when she was inside of his timesteam might be breaking down, now, but it wasn't gone yet, and the Doctor found himself deliberately unleashing what was left of it inside of Clara, to drive her higher, to drive her as out of her mind as he had been earlier. He suddenly rolled her out of the half-straddling position that she had shifted into, putting her flat on her back and him up on his side beside her.

Her eyelids were fluttering, her breasts flushed, and her hand moving rhythmically between her legs, but still at his direction and not hers. He used his hold on her mind to still the rest of her body, and felt a wave of frustration crash about her when she suddenly couldn't thrust her hips against her fingers the way that she had been doing. He could feel her becoming lost in urgency and need and frustration and he fanned the flames as high as he could, taking a moment to decide what to do with her as he savored her mewling.

She forced her eyes open, tried to focus on him. "Please, Doctor," she whined.

Yes. This was more like it. He gazed down at her, studying the exposed length of her body.

"I… need…" she tried to tell him, but he was giddy at finally feeling in control of the situation for a moment and he silenced her tongue with ease. He could feel her fighting him now, none of the easy surrender that she had been demonstrating so far, and he found himself enjoying the fight as well.

"Shh," he whispered, putting his finger to her lips. Her eyes were wild, and he could feel the panic and lust battling for control inside of her. He stilled her fingers, too, finally, just letting her come to a deceptive stillness beside him, considering the raging contest - with him, with the glamour - that was consuming her inside.

The contrast was delicious, the silence in the room near-total except for her labored breathing. Her heaving chest and rolling eyes were the only outward signs of the struggle between them.

Not that it was much of a struggle, really. Clara had been keeping him off-balance, continually surprising him ever since the events on Trenzalore. First her revelation of her life on Gallifrey, then she sent him away for a year - a year! - without so much as a by-your-leave. Then he was allowed back in her life, but he'd been unsure how to proceed nearly every step of the way due to the mystery of Clara's feelings and his guilt over his own misuse of her. Now he'd gotten her where they clearly both wanted to be, and still she was having effects on him that he couldn't anticipate or manage very well. Finally, though,  _finally_ , they had gotten to a part where he knew exactly what he was doing, and the control felt so, so good.

So, yes, Clara may have had memories of a lifetime with the mind and body of a Time Lady. She may have had centuries worth of experience with her body and with sex - arguably more than he did at this point. But Clara was still basically human, and he was a Time Lord, and no matter how adept she was at responding to his telepathy, he was still the one with his fingers on the dial. He had a thousand years of experience and a stunning talent for it even among his own people. He was still the Doctor, and the futility of her struggles soothed his much-bruised ego.

He began to stroke her, then, starting with her face and taking his time, exploring each of the curves and valleys of her throat and shoulders with profound attention to detail. He restrained his strong urge to finally lavish her gorgeous breasts with attention, instead skimming his fingers downward from her sternum to her adorable little belly-button and then resuming his exploration with the beautiful planes of her stomach. Clara's psychic thrashing was undiminished, but she could do no more than glare and gasp for breath as the Doctor acquainted himself with her body in a leisurely fashion.

Oh, she was still turned on - ridiculously turned on - but she was angry now too. Her nipples were hard, though, begging for his attention in spite of her frustration and irritation, and with great relish the Doctor finally let his hand alight. He brushed her nipple lightly with his palm before letting his fingers settle around the glorious handful of Clara's breast.

She couldn't arch into his hand, couldn't pull away. She was helpless beneath his touch, fully at his whim.

 _Doctor!_  She somehow managed to break through his restrictions, for just a moment, and just mentally, but it was enough to break his reverie and cause him to look into her eyes again.

And saw that he had pushed her too far.

He let go of her immediately and she scrambled off the bed. She was tugging angrily on the duvet, and he also sprang to his feet, alarmed. She whipped the cover around her shoulders and fixed him with a furious gaze.

"Clara, I'm sorry," he said preemptively, holding up his hands in supplication. "I'm sorry, I don't know what I was thinking."

"Well that's a good question!" she practically yelled at him. "Because clearly you  _weren't_  thinking, 'Maybe Clara is trying to get me to stop!'"

He winced. "I - I'm sorry." It was inadequate, but he wasn't quite sure what else to say.

"Are you?" Her voice was hard. "You seem to be sorry a lot lately, Doctor. Maybe you ought to try to  _stop. Screwing. Up._ "

The worst part of it was that she was right. He took a step toward her, mind racing in the hopes of figuring out something to say that would make it better, but she jerked away from him and pulled the duvet tighter around her bare shoulders.

"I - I know. Clara. I-"

"Home, Doctor."

It was as if she'd slapped him. Thrown a bucket of cold water over him. His hearts sank, he felt sick.

"Please, no, Clara. Not that again. Let's just talk this time. Let me apologize, let me explain."

She glared at him. "Home."

He could have laughed out loud at the absurdity of it all. All this time, all this worrying, and then, finally, all this progress, and with one moment's stupidity he was right back where it all had started, with a distant, angry Clara who only wanted one thing from him: his absence.

He opened his mouth, and she actually raised a finger and pointed it in his face. "No," she interrupted him. "I don't care. I don't want your apology, and I don't want your explanation. I want you to march yourself to the console room right this minute and take me home, and this time you can just  _wait_ , do you hear me? I will call you when I'm damned well ready and not a moment before, and you can just sit in your bloody box until I do!"

The Doctor found himself in straight up denial. It just couldn't be happening again. Not a second time. But Clara was utterly unmoved by his predicament, and sure enough she had them both in the console room and back to her apartment building within moments. And she walked out the TARDIS doors, still with only a blanket wrapped around her nudity, but without the slightest hesitation, leaving only a elaborate dress puddled on a rumpled bed behind her.


	11. Chapter 11

Two Wednesdays.

Well, the first one - the day he returned to Clara's life, a year after she sent him away - hadn't technically been a Wednesday. But it'd been some day of the week, and they'd talked, and she'd let him start unraveling the glamour.

He'd returned the following Wednesday - a proper Wednesday, that time - and found her sick in bed, lost in the vault that she'd built in her mind. He supposed it would have counted as a Thursday by the time she'd slept twice and then come to him in that unbelievable dress. Their first date. He scoffed in disgust at himself.

Two Wednesdays, and already it was all bollixed up again.

It was some sort of record, even for him.

* * *

Two Wednesdays.

Well, a Friday and a Wednesday, to be picky about it, not that the finer details of keeping track of time continued to make sense after running with the Doctor for a while.

 _Was_  she running with the Doctor? Clara knew that it was time to make up her mind. Because if she was - if that's what was happening - then she needed to get a better handle on it all.

They couldn't go back, they both knew it. Clara was no longer just a girl from Blackpool… she had become the Impossible Girl. No longer just a companion, but now a match for the last surviving Time Lord in the universe.

And it was either time that she embraced that, or it was time to close the TARDIS door and get on with her life.

* * *

Two Wednesdays.

To his relief, it was only two more Wednesdays before he received a call from Clara.

Well, it wasn't  _exactly_  Wednesday for him, as there were no days of the week in the time vortex. But it was close enough to Wednesday, as it'd been an appropriate number of days since the last Wednesday he visited, and he was on his way back to a Wednesday again.

"Come see me," was all she said, and hung up on him.

So he did. He parked the TARDIS in the meadow that he'd come to think of as his own, and took a long moment to compose himself before beginning the trek up to Clara's apartment.

This time, however, he was spared the climb. He was standing at the console giving himself a pep talk when the TARDIS door swung open and a serious-looking Clara came on board.

Okay. So now she was coming to him. Certain that that meant something important, he decided the wisest course of action was probably to shut up and see what she did next.

His breath caught in his throat at the flawlessness of her beauty, a beauty that had come to seem both intimidating and forbidden over the last year. Her hair was swept up off her neck, in a braid that was inarguably Gallifreyan, though her fitted leather jacket and her short skirt and her boots were 100% human, and she wore them like armor.

Clara approached him, each of them eying the other warily. He kept his hands from fidgeting with the TARDIS console only through force of will.

"I'm sorry," is what Clara said when she finally spoke, and it was not  _quite_  what he'd been expecting.

He blinked. "You're - sorry? Pardon me?"

Clara gave him a tired smile. "Well, yes, actually. None of this has exactly been easy on you, either, has it?"

The Doctor shifted on his feet, wiggling a lever in its housing. "Clara… what I've been through, it doesn't even matter next to what you have." His guilt was intense, suffocating. "Both on Trenzalore, but also since then."

But Clara was shaking her head. "No, see, that's part of how we got in this mess. I know that you feel guilty, Doctor, that you want to help me."

"Of course I do." His voice was tight with frustration.

She continued as if he hadn't spoken. "But help isn't actually what I need from you. It isn't actually what's going to make me better again."

The Doctor looked at her skeptically. "Okay. What do you mean?"

Clara took a deep breath. "I mean, that it's all too complicated. I fell in love with you long before Trenzalore, and you with me, and we both know it." There was that defiant lift to her chin, but no part of him felt the urge to protest her bluntness this time. Her words were completely true.

"Then…  _everything_ … happened," she continued. "All of it. And it screwed up my head, but Doctor, I think it screwed up your head too. To be in love with me, and then have all that guilt. And then find out the rest. And then… you weren't much better prepared for what started happening between us than I was, were you?"

It had been what he'd meant to explain to her, last time. But now, hearing her words, he rejected them. "That's no excuse, though, Clara," he protested firmly. "I pushed you  _much_  too far." He was wringing his hands now.

She took a step forward, into his personal space, and the Doctor froze. She looked up into his face and put her hands over his, to still their fretting. "No, you didn't," she told him slowly, emphatically. With the contact, he couldn't doubt the truth of her words.

They were both nearly holding their breath, the spark between them instantly blazing into a flame with the merest touch. "But I scared you," he whispered, hypnotized by her huge brown eyes, by all the knowledge and desire that they held.

"Yes you did," she admitted without rancor. "But Doctor, I am a big girl, you know. I did everything I could think of to provoke you, and surprise, it worked." She cocked a wry eyebrow at him.

"I shouldn't -"

"Stop." Clara cut him off unceremoniously. "Just stop, Doctor. Please."

She was still holding his hands, arresting their usual waving about. Only inches separated them, and the temperature in the room seemed to be rising quickly. For a moment, he wondered if Clara was going to kiss him - and wondered what he would do if she did. But she was just standing there, looking up at him, and so he considered what she was saying.

"So you don't want my help?" he said finally, in a thoughtful voice.

She gave him a small, hopeful smile. "That's right."

He studied Clara's face, so open, so perfect. He lifted one hand and ran his thumb over her cheek, then her bottom lip. She let her lips part slightly beneath the pressure, her eyes shining, and in a moment of unusual insight, he thought that perhaps he understood.

"You don't want my help," he repeated, leaning in. "You just want this." And with those words, he gently covered her mouth with his own.

He held her face and he kissed her slowly and thoroughly this time, with no rush, no urgency, no uncharacteristic aggression. Just a deep, thorough, leisurely kiss, first taking the lead himself, then relinquishing it to her, then taking it back in turn. Clara responded beautifully, coming up on her tiptoes at moments in order to better meet him. Her hands rested on his arms, one snaking up to wrap around the back of his neck, and her fingers at his nape elicited immediate bodily reactions that the Doctor didn't bother to quell.

Eventually, after long moments, he pulled back slightly to look her in the face. She was flushed but not frantic. The glamour had basically disintegrated. This was Clara, just Clara, his Clara, his Impossible Girl, and her desire and her love were all his.

"You just want… me," he said finally, something akin to wonder in his voice, as he traced a finger down a strand of hair that had come free of her elaborate braid.

Clara's smile was dazzling. "Yes."

"And…" Here he tapped her playfully on her pert little nose. "You want  _me_  to want  _you_. Not to want to help you, but just to want you."

"Ding dong, Chin-boy," she agreed cheerily, relief evident on her face. "Now you're gettin' it." Her hands tightened on his upper arms.

He leaned back in, suddenly voracious for the taste of her. Clara met him passionately, mind, soul, heart and mouth all at once.

Suddenly he wrapped his left arm tightly around her waist, nearly picking her up off the floor as he moved them around the console without breaking the kiss. He spun her about himself, absently throwing levers and pressing buttons with his free hand without even looking down.

"What are you doing?" she asked breathlessly right into his mouth.

He tore his mouth from hers and laid a line of kisses along her jaw. "I want us… in the vortex," he ground out as the distinctive wheeze of the TARDIS filled the console room. "Safer there." He propped her against the edge of the console, maneuvering his hips between her knees and thus spreading her thighs wide in the brief skirt that she wore.

Clara whimpered in approval and hitched her hips toward him encouragingly. Somehow her jacket had become unzipped - how did she  _do_  that? - and his hand was at her waist, on her skin, under her jumper.

"Doctor?"

He pulled back a bit to look her in the face. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks pink.

"Clara?"

She grinned, then, shyly. "I've been listening to you use that mouth of yours to talk your way out of trouble for what seems like thousands of years now."

He furrowed his brow at her. "Okay. And…?"

Clara started shimmying out of her knickers and tights right there where she perched on the console and gave him a wicked look. "And…. why don't you finally show me what else it's good for?"


	12. Chapter 12

It turned out to be quite a paradigm shift.

In his previous relationships with humans, the Doctor had always let his lover set the pace. As a Time Lord, he could easily dismiss such impulses, but then, also as a Time Lord, he was perfectly happy to keep up with a voracious partner.

And Clara was, apparently, voracious.

It was, of course, a Wednesday, and he'd left a message for her at the school office. He was parked in a small utility lot behind the building, between a dumpster and a shed. She'd raced out to join him after dismissing her last class, and he'd meant to sweep her away to the ruins of the Sutro Baths on an ocean world called Palamedes. But now, their Wednesday greetings had developed a tendency to wind up culminating on the floor or in Clara's quarters, as she evidently found seven days without sex to be a substantial hardship.

She had finished with him for the moment, but had not yet begun to reassemble her ensemble from the pieces that had wound up flung about her room. The Doctor was more disheveled than undressed, though his braces hung from his waistband and his bowtie hung free under his collar. He had pulled her into his lap when they were done, and she was curled up there, naked.

"Do you know that sometimes you scream in Gallifreyan?" the Doctor asked impishly, kissing the back of her shoulder.

Clara smiled. "Do I? Any other languages?" She twisted in his lap so she could see his face.

He chuckled. "Yes, sometimes. Even a couple I haven't recognized. Which is odd, because as you know, I speak everything."

They had both gotten used to it, Clara's many lives bleeding through into this one. She still had nightmares, sometimes, though once in a while when they fell asleep together, he learned that he could block them for her as long as they slept in contact.

Once in a while, when they fell asleep at the same time, together, usually after some extended and particularly gymnastic sexual encounter. But Clara still went home every week, and the Doctor still often found himself waking up alone, having drifted off reading somewhere in the TARDIS. If only she would join him, she'd never have to have nightmares. And he'd never have to wake up with a backache and a crumpled book.

"Move in," he said suddenly, with no segue. If she would move in, she'd never have to have nightmares, and he could protect her, and she wouldn't run around all week doing God-knows-what and talking to God-knows-who about whatever humans talked about all day.

Clara glanced at him briefly and then snuggled back into his chest. "I told you no. I have a life, Doctor."

He tried not to pout even though she wasn't looking his way at the moment. "You have a life  _here_ , with me," he pointed out.

"Yes I do," she agreed. "Also, I have a life at Coal Hill School, in Shoreditch."

"Well, why do you need both?" he complained. "I would always bring you here to visit, any time you wanted." His arms tightened around her possessively. "And I think that your family is even starting to like me! Well, kind of. Well, maybe a little," he amended.

Clara ran her fingers over the bare skin of his throat where he had not yet buttoned himself back up. "Doctor, the life that I built while we were apart actually matters, you know." Her voice was a bit sad.

He harrumphed. "I'm not saying it doesn't  _matter_ , Clara. I'm just saying that this one is  _better_."

* * *

The baths were as lovely as he'd heard they were, and they'd have had a delightful time exploring them all day if not for the sentient earthquakes that took them by surprise. As usual, an alien lifeform had burrowed beneath the cliffs and somehow, astonishingly, had ended up merging itself with the geology of the planet. The Doctor had been fascinated… Clara had mostly just been nauseous, from all the shaking about. She thought that she was going to lose her lunch.

From there he took her to a Zeeland marketplace where they ate sweets that hung by strings from sticks that they carried around with them as they perused the wares. He bought her a beautiful silk scarf that would adjust to any size or dimensions that she wanted, as well as a necklace that sang softly to her based on her mood. Clara treasured every gift the Doctor had ever given her, but she couldn't help a sneaking suspicion that he was trying to win her over.

Clara wasn't much for beating around the bush any more. "Are you trying to win me over to something?" she asked him bluntly as they walked a ways out of town, back to where he had left the TARDIS.

"No!" the Doctor protested, far too emphatically. "No… does a man need a reason to want to give beautiful things to a beautiful woman?"

Clara squinted at him sideways. " _You_  do. I know you, Doctor. You're still miffed that I won't come on board the TARDIS full time, aren't you?"

He grumbled a bit beneath his breath, which was exactly as good as an answer in Clara's book. She reached out and twined her fingers through his. "It's not that I don't want more time with you, you know," she reminded him.

He came to a stop, then, turning her to face him on the dirt path and taking her other hand in his as well. She could feel his frustration and confusion… he rarely shielded his thoughts or feelings from her any more.

"Well, I  _don't_  understand," the Doctor said resentfully. "Clara, I know that - before Trenzalore - I held you at arm's length, and I know that that was difficult for you as well as me, and I know that you understand why I did it. But that's all over now… you know that I'm yours, hearts and mind and soul and, and TARDIS, and fezzes, and all of it. Yours."

Clara gazed up at him, and he could feel her mental nuzzle… it was almost the psychic equivalent of a kiss on the cheek among Time Lords, and she had a knack for it. It never failed to soothe him at least a little, like the purring of the TARDIS never failed to soothe him.

"I know that, Doctor," she reassured him. "And you know that I'm yours." She knew that he would know she was telling the truth, could only tell the truth, whenever they were touching now.

He made a sound of annoyance. "Then why are  _you_  holding  _me_  at arm's length now? Is this you getting even?"

She glared up at him, dropping his hands and resuming their walk. "That's insulting. I'm not that petty and you know it."

"Fine," he admitted, "I do know it. But then, I really don't understand. Why, Clara? Don't you know how much I hate every day of your very short life that you spend without me?"

That got her to pause again, and when she turned, the Doctor was looking at her with his biggest, saddest eyes, and she realized that he was genuinely hurting.

"Oh, Doctor," Clara sighed, moving in closer to him and taking his hands again. "You really don't understand what it's like to be your companion, do you? All you know is how much you love us. You have no idea what it's like to be the one waiting for the sound of the TARDIS."

"If you don't like waiting, then stop waiting," he said darkly. "And you're not just my  _companion_ , Clara Oswald."

Clara reached up and straightened his bowtie. "Oh? What am I then, now?" she asked with a small smile.

The Doctor huffed. "Don't you know?" His old reticence was resurfacing, and Clara supposed it was probably a response to feeling so vulnerable.

She shrugged one shoulder at him. "You've never said. What is the word, anyway? I must say, I feel bizarre every time I introduce you as my 'boyfriend'. My thousand-year-old, alien, time-traveling 'boyfriend'."

His face was blank. "Well, that makes  _you_  my equally alien, equally time-traveling 'girlfriend', except that we can't even count your age in any meaningful way."

"Doctor." Her tone held a light warning, to let him know that she had noticed that he wasn't answering her question.

"Well, if I give you an official title,  _then_  will you come on board the TARDIS with me?"

Clara tugged on his hand, pulling him back toward the ship. "No."

"Then forget it," he responded petulantly. "You're stuck being my girlfriend."

* * *

It was on Lamoraal 7 that the matter came to a head.

The problem, of course, was that Clara was stunningly beautiful. And, in some technical sense, young. And, in every sense, probably very, very fertile.

The population of Lamoraal were a long-lived race that had been struck about 50,000 years into their written history with sudden, unexplained, planet-wide infertility. As a result, they had devoted themselves to turning Lamoraal into one of the most popular destinations for families across the universe, with vast theme parks, elaborate anti-grav playgrounds, and avenues and cities that were clearly designed to appeal to the under-5-foot set.

The Doctor was taking Clara to Lamoraal to play, of course, but as per usual, things did not go fully, 100% according to plan. One moment he was arguing with an attendant about whether they really were too tall to go down the 7-story anti-grav slide into the universe's biggest ball pit. The next, he turned to grab Clara by the hand, but there was no hand to grab.

She wasn't as prone to wandering off as some of his companions had been, but it had happened, so the Doctor didn't panic at first. When a couple of minutes of poking about in the environs failed to turn her up, however, he felt his chest growing tight with worry. She wouldn't wander  _far_ , he knew.

His search was interrupted when one of the android attendants responsible for keeping the peace among the various species of visiting children approached him. This was a minimalist model, capable of responding to typical inquiries and mediating an occasional food fight, but without much in the way of artificial intelligence.

"Please report to Visitor Center Rho Omicron for your compensation," the thing told him in a robotic voice.

The Doctor spun. "What? Pardon me?" He looked the attendant over, sonic-ed it briefly.

"Please report to Visitor Center Rho Omicron for your compensation," it repeated stupidly.

"Compensation?" exclaimed the Doctor. "Compensation for  _what_?" He narrowed his eyes at it, re-sonic-ing more aggressively.

"Please report to Visitor Center Rho Omicron for your compensation."

The Doctor sighed in aggravation. "Fine. Where is Visitor Center Rho Omicron?"

The attendant managed to point him in the correct direction, at least, and the Doctor set off with a steely glint in his eye, looking forward to an encounter with whatever it was that had lured or taken Clara away from him.

The Visitor Center was as plain and nondescript as all visitor centers everywhere, and staffed by smiling Lamoraalians who could be identified by their strange, hollow voices and their pointed, elfin ears. The Doctor marched directly up to the nearest one, checked its nametag, and pointed at it.

"Oi, you. Teftef. Where is Clara? I don't want compensation, I want Clara."

The Lamoraalian turned to him with a pleasant expression. "Were you directed to report here for compensation, sir?" it asked him. "Please let me check my rosters." It raised a small hand-held device and began to check some sort of record system.

The Doctor put a finger on the device and lowered it, making sure to catch the Lamoraalian's eye, making sure that the seriousness of the situation was visible on his face. "Where. Is. Clara?"

The creature tutted. "Well, I can't know if you won't let me check, can I?" Its voice was faux-reasonable.

He exhaled in exasperation and crossed his arms as the alien checked its device again.

"Aha. Clara, human female, 26 years old. Yes, we have taken her into custody and we will be borrowing her briefly. She will be returned in pristine condition when we are done. I can escort you to a overseer who can negotiate fair compensation with you based upon the customs of your planet, and will provide you with a claim check so that you can pick up your female when she is finished."

The Doctor became increasingly incensed as the Lamoraalian talked. "Compensation? Are you out of your bloody mind? Give her back to me, now!"

The creature looked at him disapprovingly, as if embarrassed for him that he was making a scene in the Visitor's Center. "I'm sorry, sir, but we require the loan of this female. As I said, my overseer will ensure that you are given a fair deal. We will only need to keep her in custody for -" here it checked its device again "- about five Earth months."

The Doctor's jaw tightened as he stared at the alien. Finally he rolled his eyes and threw up his hands. "Does the overseer have Clara? Take me to it, now."

In a few moments he found himself in a private office, glowering at another Lamoraalian, Heklek, with a distinctively female cast to her features.

"Give me Clara," was his opening. No reason to chat about the weather.

"I'm very sorry, sir. I understand that you feel distressed at the temporary loss of your female. I believe that Teftef explained to you that she will be returned unharmed in only a few months' time."

The Doctor slammed his hands down on Heklek's desk, thereby making sure that he had her full, complete attention.

"This is not negotiable," the Doctor ground out. "She is not available to you. Now bring her here."

Heklek tutted at him. "Sir, I am very sorry that you are unhappy, but I assure you that we do not need to negotiate with you regarding this matter. I would like to gently point out that the female is already in our custody and has quite possibly already been impregnated. We promise to take good care of her, and you are welcome to waive your compensation if you find it offensive. You may have her back in five months."

The Doctor was staring open-mouthed. " _Impregnated_? You cannot do this!"

She remained impassive. "As I said, it is most likely already done. Have we misunderstood, sir? Is the female your wife?"

The Doctor stammered. "That doesn't matter!"

Heklek cocked her head in a very human fashion. "Was she already impregnated? If so, the physicians will be able to establish that and remove her from queue to be returned to you. I promise that any pre-existing offspring will not have been harmed. We would never harm an offspring."

It was around that point that the Doctor realized that he was beginning to literally see red. He stalked forward and leaned over the desk threateningly toward the Lamoraalian. It was moments like this when his lanky height actually presented an advantage.

"Heklek, is it?" the Doctor asked calmly.

She leaned back a few degrees, regarding him warily. "Yes, sir."

"Okay, Heklek. I am about to download some data to your desktop." The Doctor flicked his sonic screwdriver through the air, liberating some particular files from the TARDIS and importing them directly into the Lamoraal equivalent of the internet. Heklek glanced at her screen briefly, then her eyes went wide and she leaned forward to look more closely.

"Do you understand what you're seeing, Heklek?" His voice was deceptively casual.

The alien looked at him, alarm clear on her face now. "Is that… time travel?"

He smiled menacingly. "Oh no. That's not just time travel. That, my dear, is the TARDIS."

She paled. "That's not possible. There are no TARDISes left, sir. They were all destroyed in the Last Great Time War. Everyone knows that."

He flicked the sonic at her screen again, and a new schematic popped up on her screen. "Oh, there is one left. After all, it's time travel; think about it. And do you know what I'm going to use the last TARDIS for, unless Clara is in this room in the next five minutes?"

She just blinked, quickly, twice, a Lamoraalian expression of concerned quizzicality.

The Doctor went completely impassive, fixing her with a steady stare. "I'm going to go back in time, find your parents, and make sure that you, personally, were never born. Do we have an understanding, Heklek? Do you feel like I am negotiating clearly from a position of good faith?" Finally, he was having the desired effect of communicating to these people that Clara was not going to be a part of their secret breeding project.

She was stroking her upswept ear nervously. "I see, sir. Well. That does change things, a bit. If you will excuse me for a moment, I will… relay the terms of your… revision to our agreement, to my overseers?"

He took one more step toward her. "No. You will  _not_  relay any terms. You will  _go get_  Clara. Understand?"

And with that Heklek scurried from the room, leaving a furious and very, very frightened Doctor in her wake.


	13. Chapter 13

He paced angrily as he waited for Heklek's return, stewing over every word she'd said, every hint that she'd dropped about what might have happened to Clara.

 _Impregnated?_  This had better be some kind of a sick joke. And  _already_? Impregnated how? If someone had touched her… hurt her… if someone had  _raped_  Clara…

It was so horrible that his mind kept shying away from it. Every single second that he waited to find out what had happened to her seemed to stretch into an eon.

It was another Lamoraalian who led the way when the door opened again, this one richly dressed and imperious in bearing, while Heklek trailed behind looking frightened.

"You are the male who brought the human female Clara to Lamoraal today?  _You_  are not human," she stated, looking him over appraisingly.

The Doctor ground his teeth. "Where is she? Take me to her."

She put her hands on her hips and stared at him. "She's fine. My name is Overseer Tay. Who are you? And how in all the hells did you get a TARDIS? You can't be a Time Lord; they're extinct."

The Doctor was concerned that the Lamoraalian definition of "fine" might diverge from his own, so he found little comfort in the woman's reassurance regarding Clara. He restrained the urge to throttle her, instead taking two steps forward to get directly in her face.

"I most assuredly  _am_  a Time Lord, Overseer. And so you'll understand what I'm capable of, when I tell you that I will be very, very delighted to take on the project of reducing your entire civilization to nothing but a  _rumor_ , if you have harmed a single hair on that woman's head."

Tay's expression didn't change, but she did pale markedly. "You're lying. Everybody knows that they're all dead."

He was profoundly tired of this argument already. With absolutely no warning, his arm shot out, he grabbed her by the back of the neck before she had even begun to flinch, and he jerked her forward, knocking his forehead against hers with a fairly disorienting amount of force. He was braced for it, whereas she was most definitely not. Add to her dizziness the fact that he had just uploaded a significant amount of information directly to her brain in one split second – and that that information confirmed that he was indeed what he claimed to be and that his threat might be valid – and one could almost forgive her for the near-panic reaction that it took her a moment to calm down from.

"Get it together," snapped the Doctor unsympathetically. "Unless you require further convincing, I want us to be moving toward Clara  _right now._ "

She staggered to her feet with a level of urgency that satisfied him and led him – and the still-trailing Heklek – through the halls to a small transporter room. From there they transported to a hospital of sorts, though one that was furnished almost like a home in its comforts, and the staff of Lamoraalians were all incredibly warm and pleasant as they bustled about their tasks.

And the whole thing was obviously a maternity ward, as small babies were being handled and transported all around the facility, and almost all of the patients were young women of various humanoid races. All of whom seemed healthy and undistressed. Perhaps even sedated.

The Doctor was nearly beside himself with rage. The only other time that he had felt quite this intensity of unfettered hatred and fury had been the day that he had rescued Amelia Pond from the depraved Madame Kovarian. And though they had violated Amy, violated and traumatized her profoundly – they had not raped her. They had not put a baby in her womb against her will. The child had been Rory's, conceived in love on board the TARDIS.

As Clara's child should be, if she were ever going to have one.

Tay was finally talking again, rubbing the back of her neck as she led him through the halls at a brisk trot. "I suppose I should have believed you, considering what happened," she was muttering. "The female must be part Gallifreyan as well. That would explain it. She looked entirely human when we scanned her. I don't know how she fooled us."

"What happened?" he demanded, but she cut him off with a wave at the room they were approaching.

Clara was inside, seated in the sun by the window, dressed in a hospital gown. This one was a bright green, though, jarringly cheery in a room where women were brought to be impregnated against their wills.

"Clara," he cried, rushing immediately to her and passing the sonic over her, trying to simultaneously look her over and sense her mood and thoughts all at the same time. "Clara, are you all right?"

She looked cross more than anything, though he knew her well enough to see the fear that she was concealing. "Doctor, I'm fine. Their  _procedure_  didn't work on me. They've spent the last twenty minutes trying to figure out what they're doing wrong, and between you and me, honestly, I don't think they're getting anywhere."

Tay stood to the side watching the reunion anxiously, while Heklek had managed to get herself lost somewhere en route. Tay cleared her throat unhappily, and the Doctor turned just a degree, fixing her with a flat look.

"That's not…  _exactly_ … true. That the procedure didn't work. It just didn't… fully work."

He gave her a very tight, inquisitive smile, clearly expecting elaboration.

Tay took a deep breath. "She appears to be in… some sort of quantum state, as best as we can tell. Our most sophisticated equipment will only return an answer of 'unknown' to the query, which is not even an answer that they're programmed to provide. It's supposed to be a straightforward question." At this point she sounded genuinely frustrated with the entire situation.

The Doctor was studying Clara closely, and she gave him a pained half-smile. It was eerie how reminiscent it was of his attempts to scan Amy's early pregnancy with Melody all those years ago, but this time he actually had a theory about what was going on. Though it didn't seem… possible.

Oh, Clara. Would she never stop doing impossible things?

"Clara, you don't even have the physiology to create a binding. Is that… did you do this? On purpose?"

Clara raised her eyebrows. "Apparently."

The Doctor shook his head in wonder, then squeezed her knee and stood up to take a look at the Lamoraalian's monitors, his brow furrowing. "This  _is_  bizarre. Clara, do you  _feel_  like it worked?"

"Feel like what worked?" interjected Overseer Tay, but one sharp look from the Doctor quickly quelled her tongue again.

Clara shrugged, gazing out the window. "It worked. I could tell. It felt almost exactly the same, even with my own physiology."

He returned to sonic-ing Clara some more, giving perplexed looks to his screwdriver. "But Clara, how can you be absolutely sure? Why aren't you coming up 'not pregnant' on their tests?"

The question seemed to exhaust her. "I don't know. Stupid tests?"

He was concerned by how tired she seemed. Perhaps forcing a Gallifreyan mind trick onto her human physiology had been excessively draining, or perhaps something was actually wrong with her. The Doctor wasn't taking any chances.

"Her clothes," he barked toward Tay, wrapping his hand around Clara's upper arm and urging her to her feet. "I want you back on the TARDIS, now," he addressed to Clara. "Away from these lunatics." She didn't offer much resistance, just let him pull her along.

Tay called for a nurse, who returned shortly with Clara's clothes in a zippered bag that was marked with her name. In the meantime, the Doctor once again made sure that he had the Overseer's attention by positioning himself about four inches from her very, very worried face.

"Well, you lot. You think of all of this as perfectly harmless, don't you?"

If possible, Tay paled even further. "We have no children, sir. This is our only recourse, and we do not harm the females we borrow. Please, sir… please don't try to take this away from us. We only have a few thousand new offspring, and we need many more if our race is to survive." Her words were pleading in spite of the fear in her eyes.

The Doctor was utterly unmoved. "I am going to take Clara home and make sure that she is properly sorted out. Once she is, I am going to come back here."

Tay's eyes widened.

"When I return - and I am not even going to give you an estimate of how long that might be - what I had better find is  _extensive_ evidence that you have begun dismantling this facility, and any others like it. Also returning  _every_  woman here to her own family, including any who are currently impregnated, where they can decide for themselves how to proceed with  _their_  unexpected children. And you as a species will relinquish all rights to  _every_  child who has already been conceived, unless the child's mother  _releases_  the child to you of her own free will."

The Lamoraalian was shaking visibly now. She clearly had to make herself speak, and her words wavered. "Sir… these children  _have_  mothers. Lamoraalian mothers. The borrowed females are just surrogates."

The Doctor actually reached out and gripped the front of Tay's elaborate tunic, pulling her in another inch. "Not as far as I'm concerned, they don't. You lot waived that right when you decided that medical  _rape_  was justified." He let go and turned away, clearly dismissing her.

He gathered Clara back to him and began to lead her from the facility. He let his words trail behind him as he walked away. "And Tay… I invite you to use your wildest imagination to guess what the consequences will be if I return to find anything other than your full and enthusiastic cooperation."

* * *

Clara stumbled a couple of times as they made their way back to the TARDIS, so the Doctor took her directly to the medical bay and helped her up on one of the beds there. What concerned him most was that she did not even try to protest, just laying back and closing her eyes.

He brought the TARDIS's scanners to bear but without much of an increase in information. The TARDIS wasn't responding quite like it had when it had been scanning Amy's flesh avatar… then the ship had reported that Amy was both pregnant and not pregnant. The report now was that Clara was, rather,  _somewhat_  pregnant.

The Doctor laid his hands over Clara's and closed his eyes, and felt her tired smile as their minds touched.

 _Show me…_  he prompted her gently.

She took him by the hand and led him through her interior landscape. Everything seemed fine - the various bits of various Claras inside of her, now functioning together where they had been a jumbled mess directly after Trenzalore - the many constructs and edifices that represented all that Clara was and thought and felt.

She led him to a small place that was warm and humid, but comforting, with the thick smell of life in the air. It was strangely reminiscent of Clara's apartment, which was overflowing with plants in every corner and nook and on every shelf. He'd always thought of Clara's affinity for greenery as part of her well-developed maternal instincts… evidently that was literally true.

 _Here,_  she thought.

The Doctor peered around. She was right, there was no other life here. A few of the vines had been torn down from the walls in places, revealing scorch marks on the nondescript surfaces beneath, and he thought that that might be the marks of the Lamoraalian's meddling. He was relieved that it seemed minor enough that Clara would probably heal quickly on her own. But then, this was a girl who had put herself back together after being torn into shreds by the time winds. The Lamoraalians, for all their evil, had nothing on that.

Then why were all of the various scanners not sure that Clara wasn't pregnant?

He looked around more closely, stepping over to the walls and running his hands over them, examining the vegetation and peering out the windows where they peeked through. Clara just watched him, patiently waiting. Finally he situated himself in the exact middle of the small space, closed his eyes - well, his eyes had been closed back in the real world already, but the symbolism still mattered - and just focused on opening himself up to the vibrations of her psyche.

Clara. His Clara. Warm. Loving. Brave. Funny. Open. Determined. Fiercely protective. Dangerous. Loving.

This was his Clara, and he found himself smiling.

Clara. Also: anxious. Fearful. Temperamental. Stubborn.

Not the worst set of flaws. Better than his own, anyway.

He stayed where he was, still, letting himself sink further and further into the feeling of the place.

And he felt it.

Not-Clara.

Another life.

A furrow emerged between his eyebrows. It was… subtle. Easy to miss.

It wasn't exactly life. More the  _potential_  for life, suspended, frozen, not yet manifested.

That was why it wasn't  _there,_  wasn't anywhere to be  _found_  in the symbolic space of Clara's psyche. This life wasn't a  _thing_ , not yet. It was an idea.

He focused on it, amplified it. Moved slowly back toward Clara, without opening his eyes. He reached out and took her hands - not actually necessary, here, but still familiar to them both - and he opened her awareness to what he had found.

He felt her surprise, then curiosity. She was also focusing on it now that she had found it, and whatever it was - the potential, the idea - it responded to Clara in a way that it had not to him. Though it was frozen in time, not yet real, it still recognized, he supposed, its mother.

Oh, Clara.

And he felt the sadness sweep over her, as she realized what had happened. That she had not actually prevented the Lamoraalian procedure from working… she had just managed to suspend the process in her body, before it had even really taken hold. But that it - what was 'it,' not even a embryo? - but what it wanted, was to exist.

The Doctor and Clara both opened their eyes, back in the med bay of the TARDIS, and looked at each other. And Clara began to cry.


	14. Chapter 14

The Doctor pulled her into his arms and held her silently as she cried.

His mind was racing, but for once he actually recalled that sometimes humans in crisis needed a moment or two to feel some emotions before they were ready to get down to the business of what to do next. Fortunately, his Clara was a pragmatic girl… she sobbed hard for a couple of minutes, then she wiped one shaking hands across her tears, took a deep breath, and looked at him, and that was that.

"Clara, you don't have to do this." His voice had taken on that urgent quality that it tended to when he was trying to protect someone he loved.

She looked down at her hands, twisted her ring around her middle finger. "Doctor, it didn't work. I can't just keep my body in suspended animation forever, not now that I know what happened. I have to undo the binding, and then I'm going to come up a straight 'positive' on all those tests, aren't I?"

He shook his head in silent frustration. "I could help you. Your human body didn't fully cooperate with it, but maybe between the two of us - me  _actually_  a Time Lord, you with the memories of doing this before - we could figure it out, and finish the binding off properly. It could work."

She shook her head. "No. This body won't do it. Now that you've found it for me, I can feel it, plain as day. I should have caught it right away. I know what to do with my brain, but it only got this body halfway there."

He cast about for something else. "There are… human ways…" he trailed off, knowing that those ways wouldn't be for Clara, and the look on her face confirmed it.

The Doctor stood up. He needed to pace. Clara just sat there, looking crushed.

He wrung his hands. "Well. Evidently their gestational period is five months. We can do this. We've gotten through worse. But the-the-the  _baby_ …" he obviously had to work to get the word out, "…will be Lamoraalian. It's not genetically related to you. We just have to get through this thing, and then the Lamoraalians can raise it, and we'll just take our time getting over things, you know, if you need to. No hurry, and I'm here to take care of you. Well. I mean. Unless you want - if you, if you have to have it, do you  _want_ to raise it?"

The entire conversation was too surreal to be believed, and Clara was looking up at him with sad eyes.

"I've always wanted to be a mum, you know," she mused, in a thoughtful voice, as if none of this were happening. "Then, well, this whole thing with you happened, and I figured it wasn't going to be in the cards for me. I thought about that a lot, the year that we were apart, did you know that?" He hadn't known it, but he just waited, letting Clara talk.

Her eyes were far away. "I knew that when you came back, either that would be that, and I would have to go on with the life I'd been making, or that you and I would probably eventually travel again. I didn't know if we'd be lovers, but of course I knew that it was a possibility. I knew we wouldn't be able to raise a child, not even if you'd been willing to, not living this way. So… I let go of it. I can't have this life  _and_  that one, so I chose."

The Doctor felt a lump in this throat as he listened to Clara. She had sacrificed even more for him than he had realized. All that time, torn into echoes of herself. Expecting not to survive it. And then, given her life back… and she gave up the future she'd dreamed of as a girl, to be with him.

And now, this. Also, of course, because she traveled with him.

Her eyes were back on him, and they were moist now. "I don't think I can live with any of my options."

The Doctor swept forward, knelt down in front of her, clasping her hands inside of his. "No, Clara, don't say that. We're going to find a way forward. We always do."

She gave him a weak smile. "Ah, Doctor. Always the optimist."

He kissed her fingers, looked at her over her hands. "And I'm  _always_  right."

Her gaze softened as she looked at him, and he was struck, as he often was, by the great depth of her love for him. Sometimes he thought that she loved him almost as much as he loved her.

"If this had to happen," she said softly, looking away, "this baby should have been yours."

He could not help it, her words brought a dampness to his own eyes. Perhaps because he knew that she was right.

They may not have held her down and raped her, but they had violated her as much as they had Amy Pond, and he was struck with a wave of fury at all that had just been taken from her. In one lousy afternoon gone wrong.

Clara was gazing at him, then slowly she leaned forward, and he was surprised when she kissed him.

Her mouth was tender, seeking comfort, and the Doctor was happy that he could provide some in any form. He pulled her into his arms, cradling her body and gently, slowly, lingeringly kissing her warm, sweet mouth. They rocked together mentally, like a small boat on the vast ocean of her sadness.

After a languorous interval, he gently tugged on a handful of her hair, right at the base of her skull, and she gave a small whimper as her body relaxed. That was all he needed. As much power as Clara had over him because of the profound way that she alone knew him, it was also true that he had now spent a fair amount of time inside of her, body and mind. He knew Clara Oswald, and he could read her body like a book. He felt her give way to that single tug of his hand, and he knew exactly how to take care of his Impossible Girl.

But he wanted better than the Medical Bay, no matter how often the sudden onset of their lovemaking had left them  _in flagrante_  in various unexpected locations on and off the TARDIS. Today was a day for him to take the lead, and he lifted Clara's petite body in his arms and carried her through the corridors to her quarters, which the TARDIS politely placed nearly.

She clung to him, nuzzling into his chest, one of her small hands deftly untying his bowtie and unbuttoning his top few buttons. The test of time had revealed, she truly did have a superpower. One that the Doctor had come to appreciate.

He put her on her feet first so he could deliberately undress her. He liked taking each of her garments off of her himself, dropping them in puddles on the floor that often left a trail toward the nearest surface. The brush of his hands over her skin as he unbuttoned, unzipped, and unbuckled her clothing gave him time to play with both of their desire, pushing them both upwards with each fleeting contact, becoming more frequent as more of her skin was revealed to him.

Clara was her most responsive self, moaning and whimpering at the touch of his hands on her body. Her sadness had given way to the building roar of her desire, and she tugged on his braces to move him with her as she backed up to the bed.

"You… are so… beautiful," he told her, laying her down and coming down to join her. "And you are  _completely_  mine."

His words unleashed a wave of emotion, and Clara pulled him down into a much rougher kiss. The upward spiral was carrying them both now, and he slid his hand between her legs and began urging her into her first climax as he sought out the hollow behind her ear.

"Mine, Clara," he repeated, pleased as always by how quickly she could come for him when she put her mind to it. She loved to hear him say it, and it had become nearly a mantra for him whenever she was close to the edge. Today, given all that had happened, he heard it come out of his mouth with an unusual fierceness. She was his, but the Lamoraalians had interfered with her, and he found that he suddenly understood why she had leaned in to kiss him.

She needed him to reclaim her as much as he needed to do so. It was what they both needed, before they could come to terms with or decide what to do about the new life that wanted to exist inside of Clara.

She must have felt his flash of insight. She reached down and covered his hand with her own, both of them panting hard into one another's mouths as she came the first time, and he knew that they were both thinking about the connection between these acts and how that life was supposed to come into being.

No matter. More of this. The Doctor made her come a second and third time in rapid succession with his mouth, reveling in both the taste and the feel of her all around him, before he abruptly flipped her facedown on the bed and came up behind her.

"You're ready for me, aren't you?" He bit the back of her shoulder.

She nudged her hips back, inviting him home, and he obliged with a low groan. "I'm always ready for you," she reminded him.

He still had no idea how a girl who was so excruciatingly tight was also able to easily take him in without the hour or two of foreplay that a human woman usually needed; she had tried to convince him once that the two were related, but at the moment he couldn't even muster up the extra brain processes to try to analyze the paradox. He was too busy being destroyed by the ecstasy of it, as he pushed himself into Clara as deeply as he could from behind her. He slid one hand over her ribs to find her breast and tease her hard nipple. He braced himself on the other hand, and began to fuck her slowly and deeply.

Clara. She was perfect.

She was perfect, and she was his, and he was furious that anyone else had dared to lay a hand on her.

He lost himself in her psychically and physically, guiding their bodies and minds as they moved together. He found himself telling her over and over that he would never let anyone else touch her ever again, and her impassioned cries in response made clear that the words were for them both.

"Yours," she began to cry, as she felt his climax approaching and her body stretching around him as he swelled. They were tumbling together through both of their internal worlds as they disintegrated into incoherency. And yet - and yet! - at the critical moment, when he realized that he was about to tumble over the edge himself, that he was about to fill Clara once again with his seed…

… with his seed…

They both saw and felt it at the same moment, as they began to climax together, their voices echoing off the walls of the TARDIS.

The Doctor's first response was a sudden wave of joyful, angry triumph. This was quickly followed on its heels by dismay at realizing that there was no time to consider it and no time to stop it, and fear of hurting Clara further.

But she, his Impossible Girl, she was with him, and her cries of relief swept aside his frantic mental scramble to try to understand the implications of what seemed to already be occurring. It was all too much, and with a loud cry of his own he rocked into her body and held himself there, fingers digging into her hips, while she convulsed around him.

His brain started making some urgent attempts to get itself back online quickly as they started to fall forward onto the bed, but Clara was having none of it. Somehow, as if with another one of those tricks that no one had ever taught him, she was able to turn herself beneath him, sliding her bent knee across his torso and then pulling him forward into the cradle of her body now that she was facing him.

But then she managed to roll them so that she was suddenly straddling him, all with his swollen erection staying inside her body in the immediate aftermath of their brain-shattering orgasms. It was a complicated maneuver that Clara executed with ease, and she immediately pushed the Doctor flat onto his back and began to move astride him.

He had barely finished coming, but the determination on her face, the raw lust and hunger and joy and steely determination all on her perfect features, and the Doctor was instantly caught back up in the eroticism of it. She was moving her torso in stunningly provocative ways, with her small breasts shifting above the planes of her beautiful stomach. Her hands were at her breasts, tugging hard at her own swollen nipples, and her burning eyes were locked on his. This was Clara at her wildest, her most wanton.

She was glorious.

He reached up and cupped her breasts, savoring the feel of her aching nipples - he could feel her ache for himself - brushing against his palms. He could see what was happening in her eyes and he welcomed it. She shoved her hands into her hair, dragged her fingers across her lips. His eyes were fixed on her face and body, drinking in the sight of her, shining with the same wonder with which he looked at the stars.

She slowed down, then, and fell into an easy rhythm, letting him play with her body, with her breasts. Letting him take his time as he built toward a second orgasm with no break.

Her nipples were incredible, puckering up into prominent nubs that begged for his fingers and his teeth. Occasionally he would pull her forward and bring one of her breasts to his mouth. He suckled her intensely enough to darken the skin, catching her flesh between his teeth to elicit sharp cries from her. When it was his fingers at work, he tugged at her turgid nipples with increasing force and Clara arched her back, pushing forward for more, more sensation.

Her body's responses were dramatic, and they were both coated in her juices - and, probably now, some of his. She rocked her hips with incredible skill, creating friction between their bodies that often made it quite difficult to hold off orgasm for long.

But this time, this time they took their time.

"You know what you're doing, don't you, Clara?" he asked, pushing up into her body.

She added a slight, calculated stutter into her rhythm that almost drove him out of his mind right then and there. "Do you, Doctor?" she asked with a dangerous glint in her eye.

His tightened his grip on her thighs, fingers bruising her skin, then he suddenly pulled her forward, wrapped his arms around her, and flipped them both.

He jerked up one knee of hers to find the deepest angle possible and drove himself into her with as much force as he could muster. He placed a hand at her throat, not squeezing at all, but snug against her windpipe, just enough to elicit that submissive throat-baring response that he found so indescribably hot.

"I  _do_  know what I'm doing, dear," he whispered in her ear, punctuating his words with the punishing rhythm he set up for them both. "I'm  _finishing_... what I started."

She mewled and writhed beneath him, no longer trying to bring any skill to bear, just abandoning her body to its wildness and knowing that that would do more for him than any tricks she had up her sleeve. He had her pinned with his weight, and he grabbed one of her hands out of its useless flailing about and held it down at the wrist, pushing her even further into a profound surrender that would facilitate what he was about to do.

He nipped at her mouth. "I'm sealing the deal, Clara Oswald. I'm claiming you as mine and I'm going to make sure that the entire universe knows it." She was losing herself, spinning out of control, and he let her fly, intoxicated by his unfettered access to her body and soul and heart and mind. "In fact, I'm not going to let you out of this bed until I've taken you in every single way that you can imagine. I want you to wake up tomorrow sore all over from my thorough use of you tonight. Because Clara, my Impossible Girl: You. Are. Mine. And I am going to make damn sure that you never, ever forget it."

His words pushed them both over, and he spilled into her with full knowledge of the likely consequences of their brash actions. Clara was crying quietly and coming hard and kissing him, and he was kissing her back as he filled her a second time in one night, and it was possible that not all of the wetness on their faces came from her.


	15. Chapter 15

True to his word, they spent the night in bed but did not get any sleep. Well, he let her drift off for an hour or so once or twice, between rounds, to help keep her stamina up. Clara had about as much endurance as he'd ever seen in a human, but this was truly a marathon undertaking; had they not been cocooned aboard the TARDIS, floating in the time vortex, morning light would have started to creep in the windows by the time that they were both satiated.

They didn't really refer any more to what they'd done, just falling further and further into each other instead. When she finally fell asleep for good, the Doctor thought that he'd stay and hold her for a while, in case she had nightmares. Instead he found himself opening his eyes quite a bit later, shocked by the length of the sleep cycle he'd fallen into. Evidently four orgasms in one night was enough to put him out for a few hours. He'd been a much, much younger man the last time he'd attempted something like that.

They were a tangle of bare limbs and twisted sheets, and Clara was snoring gently under his arm. The Doctor gazed down at her, taken with her perfection even in repose. He'd always been more attracted to attitude, intelligence and humor than to beauty, but he had to admit that he didn't mind that Clara had all of the above.

He closed his eyes, seeking for a moment into Clara's sleeping mind. Things were always a little strange in there when someone was asleep, but she seemed to be in between active dreaming states. He was able to locate the room that she'd taken him to the previous day with just a little careful searching.

He hesitated outside for a moment, aware that just about any outcome was going to present many difficulties. Yet he had found that by his second orgasm the previous night, he had somehow become wildly, irrationally attached to one particular outcome.

Inside of the room in Clara's mind, a small, warm light shone, floating gently near the ceiling, not yet having burrowed into one of the walls, but clearly preparing to do so.

The Doctor gazed at it in wonder. He moved closer slowly, carefully, not wanting to frighten it.

This? This was not Lamoraalian.

This was Gallifreyan. And human.

This was theirs.

He felt Clara's hand slip into his and realized that he hadn't even noticed her join him. He looked over and saw her face shining with emotion, a mirror of his own, he knew. He squeezed her hand, and she squeezed his back.

In bed, both slowly opened their eyes. Clara looked up at him, and he smiled down at her, pulling her in closer against his side.

"Are you… okay?" she asked. They'd just been together in her mind, so he knew that really she should know the answer to that herself, but everyone needed reassurance sometimes.

"Clara… I'm more than okay."

She was delightfully tousled and sleepy-eyed, but her expression was concerned. "We just… we didn't exactly plan on this."

The Doctor chuckled at the understatement. "I didn't say that I wasn't scared out of my mind, Clara. Just that I'm okay that it's happened. Well. More than okay, as I said."

She smiled up at him, a smile full of trust and warmth, and again he wondered what he'd ever done to deserve a woman like this.

" _You've_  done this before," she reminded him.

He trailed his fingers over her shoulder, describing some kind of complicated pattern. "Yes. I was young, and I lived on Gallifrey, and I didn't have a list of enemies as long as - well, much, much longer than my arm."

Clara thought about that. "So it's worrying about our safety that scares you? Not… the rest?"

He gave her a wry look. "You mean being a father? Clara, do you have any idea what it will mean to me to get to be a father one more time?" He paused, studying her face. "To bring another Time Lord back into the universe? And to get to do this with  _you_ , the most amazing woman I've ever met, and halfway to Gallifreyan yourself?"

She looked at him, perplexed but happy. "I always assumed… that this wouldn't be something you would want.

The Doctor had a faraway look in his eyes. "It wasn't really about wanting. My people have been gone for centuries. The only other species I've ever found compatible is you lot, and you know why I try to avoid all that. How would this happen for me?"

Clara grinned. "Evidently, like this."

He found himself returning the smile. "Well. Yes. Evidently."

They both sobered, and he ran his hand down her arm, found her slender waist and followed its curves. "Clara, I took myself out of this game a long time ago because I have had my enemies try to hurt me through the people I love too many times, and I was not willing to give them a tiny, defenseless person as a target. Do you understand me?"

Her eyes were serious. "Of course I understand you, Doctor. You told me what happened to Amy and Rory's daughter. I have thought about all this."

He nodded. "Good. Because with the safety of our son on the line, you are going to have to be a part of some very serious decision-making." He took her hand, kissed her knuckles. "We are going to build a good life for this family, Clara Oswald, you and I. And we are going to keep it safe."

Clara's eyes were shining, and she stared at him for a moment. "Our… son?"

The Doctor smiled at her. "Yes, dear. Our  _son_."

* * *

He whisked her to the French quarter of New Orleans and stuffed her full of beignets for breakfast, where Clara was shocked to learn that the Doctor expected them to settle planet-side, as opposed to living on the TARDIS.

"I thought you'd go mad," she said between mouthfuls of heavenly, flaky pastry.

"Well of course, I would lose my mind if I tried to live in one place without ever getting out." He gestured at her with his fork. "But we won't be stuck… the TARDIS will be parked right inside our home. I don't even want her outside."

Home. Family. Their son. All of this in less than twenty-four hours. Clara had to admit that her head was spinning.

"And where will 'home' be?" Clara asked.

The Doctor took a sip of tea, looking at her over the rim of the cup. "Well. I presume that you want to be close to your father, don't you? But Clara, I think that we'll be safest if we try to build a small, modest life. We'll still have all of time and space at our fingertips. But the fewer people who know us, or who know to connect us as a family to  _me_ , the better."

In the end they decided to find a small home in a quiet London neighborhood far enough away from Clara's family and Coal Hill to discourage unannounced visitors. Clara badly wanted to continue teaching, though the Doctor had misgivings - he wished he could go back and have her find employment under another identity, to avoid any connection between her pregnancy and her life with the Doctor. But there was nothing to be done for it now, and it meant too much to Clara to ask her to give it up.

She was relieved to encounter no resistance on the topic of telling her father the truth of the Doctor's origins and their son's alien heritage. Clara made the Doctor swear that he would never breathe a word of Clara's sacrifice on Trenzalore - not that she thought that he planned to slip it into casual conversation. But Dave Oswald would have disregarded Clara's own choice in the matter, would never have forgiven the Doctor for allowing Clara to have suffered so much.

They spent the next couple of weeks setting up a household, a strangely domestic set of tasks even if life with the Doctor involved some pretty unconventional methods of going about those tasks. They found a small but well-kept Victorian and somehow, magically, the Doctor manifested the title for it.

They pulled almost all their furnishings from the interior of the TARDIS… between all her rooms and the many storage areas, Clara found that she was able to appoint their home with very few new purchases, and in an eclectic fashion that reflected their galaxy-hopping lifestyle. And of course, each day, new alien conveniences showed up in their home. Their kitchen had all the conventional equipment, but additionally it was possible to brew a perfect cup of coffee in less than a second. And Clara never had to wait for the water in the shower to warm up.

Also as part of settling in, they found themselves, at some point, 'christening' every room in their new abode with their impromptu relations. They discovered quickly that Clara's pregnancy only intensified their lovemaking, if that was even possible. The Doctor had felt protective of Clara since the day that he found her… after all, he'd already watched her die twice. But having her carrying his son - the only other Time Lord in the universe - was driving him to distraction with his need to care for her. He knew she would lose her mind if he constantly hovered and fretted, so instead it came out in bed, as a sort of erotic possessiveness. Which appeared to work very well indeed for both parties.

* * *

"So, uh, am I supposed to get human-y medical care too? You know, vitamins and ultrasounds and stuff?"

Clara was green to the gills as she asked the question. The nausea had set in in the previous week, and it was formidable. Something about carrying a half-alien baby.

They were wandering somewhat idly through a market district on Edmee, where they had an appointment for later that day with a sisterhood of midwives who were exalted throughout the universe. The Doctor had his arm draped over Clara's shoulders, and was steering her from stall to stall as they each picked out clothes, toys and household items that caught their fancy.

"You don't need all that monitoring, Clara, just like you didn't need to pee on a stick in order to know whether you were pregnant." The Doctor picked up a glass prism that refracted the mid-day light into various shapes and images, mostly animals, to amuse little minds. "You'll know if anything requires attention, and I should be able to assist you with almost any complications that could arise. If not, we'll use the midwife. That's what she's for."

After eating lunch on the grass in a nearby park, the Doctor led Clara to a sprawling campus of low buildings with open floorplans. Women of various species in various states of gravidity were waiting or consulting with the sisters, who were soft-spoken humanoids with a wide-range of skin tones and an unusual psychic-somatic gift.

The Doctor took Clara to an office where they were received by a lavender woman with big eyes and a long mane of silver hair. She introduced herself as Mary.

"Is that your real name?" Clara had to ask, shaking her hand and experiencing an immediate ebb in her nausea that almost made her swoon with relief.

Mary smiled. "Our true names are not verbal, Miss Clara. We choose a common name from the species of the mother we are attending."

Oddly, the Doctor refrained from shaking Mary's hand, though the midwife neatly concealed this by the smoothness with which she moved forward into settling Clara into a comfortable chair, the Doctor perched beside her on a low stool.

"May I provide some more lasting relief from your sickness, to help you focus?" Mary asked politely.

Clara assented, and with no more than a wave of the midwives delicate hands and a few whispered words, Clara felt the veil of nausea lift entirely. It looked like magic, though Clara understood that it was not.

"And may I peek in on your son, to make sure he is also as comfortable as possible as we start?"

It was strange, to hear their new, tiny fetus referred to as his own person, but Clara again nodded. She noticed how tense the Doctor was as Mary again leaned forward and let her hands hover just above Clara still-flat abdomen.

She understood why, when Mary's eyes flew up, fixed immediately upon him, and then she blinked a few times. She sat back slowly, looking at them both curiously.

"My apologies, for my reaction. Your son is healthy and well. I thought he was fully human, but I see that you were not completely forthcoming with me when you made this appointment, Dr. Smith." A look of dawning understanding passed over her face and she repeated the name he had given her… "Ah. Doctor… Smith…"

The Doctor smiled grimly. "Just Doctor, actually, Mary."

She exhaled, looking between them. "I see. And the child… his other heritage…?"

"… is what you think it is," the Doctor affirmed.

The lavender of her skin had darkened, but the look on her face told Clara that were she human, she would be paling, not darkening.

"A Time Lord," she said solemnly. "The son of the last remaining Time Lord."

The Doctor sat forward. "So you understand why we came to you."

Clara looked between them, but it was Mary who elaborated, obviously exquisitely sensitive to Clara's every need in spite of her own shock. "Miss Clara, the Sisterhood takes the privacy of our families extremely seriously. I cannot violate your confidentiality - none of us can - and I would experience increasing pain, and eventually death, if I even tried."

"That seems a bit barbaric, doesn't it?" Clara looked taken aback.

Mary smiled at her reassuringly. "Not if we never break our vows, it is not."

Mary led Clara though a meandering conversation about her hopes and fears for her pregnancy, her health history, her family. The Doctor did not volunteer anything about his own medical or family history and Mary did not ask. Likewise Clara did not provide any explanation of her great familiarity with Gallifreyan custom and implications for her pregnancy, but Mary seemed to have a great intuition for questions to avoid. And Clara was relieved that she was able to perceive how Mary had turned down her nausea so effectively and even to replicate the effect, though not quite as completely.

The midwife echoed the Doctor's sentiment that Clara did not need any formal monitoring once she understood that Clara was capable of attending to her body in a way that human woman typically could not. She answered all of Clara's questions and asked to be informed of any complications. At the end, she asked about their plan for the child's birth.

"The Gallifreyan way is for the parents to homebirth without anyone attending," the Doctor told her, then turned to Clara. "It's very safe for us, Clara, or I wouldn't even ask you to consider it."

But Clara was already nodding. "I'd already thought about it, and I'd like to do it alone. As long as we can know that Mary is quickly available to us if anything goes wrong." Her heart was warmed by his look of pride and pleasure.

"Besides," she added, "that way, no record of his birth, right?" A shadow passed over the Doctor's eyes, and Clara knew that he regretted that they had to worry about things like that because of him.

After the interview they emerged into the bright afternoon sunshine, both feeling reassured that their unplanned meddling in the aftermath of Clara's ordeal with the Lamoraalians had not resulted in anything untoward. If anything, Mary had confirmed for them that Clara's pregnancy was unusually healthy and that they need have little fear of losing it before it came to term.

They turned to look at each other, clasping hands. The Doctor's hair was ruffled over his eyes by a warm breeze, and his face was more relaxed than it had been in weeks.

"So… it's really time to do this, right?" Clara said nervously.

He smiled reassuringly. "Only if you're ready, Clara. We have plenty of time if you're not."

"No." She took a deep breath. "He's only going to be more upset if we wait longer. Besides, he deserves to know. It's his grandson."

"And you're sure you want me there when you explain it?"

Clara laughed out loud, a sound of genuine amusement. "Doctor, how would I  _ever_  get him to believe me otherwise?"


	16. Chapter 16

"Dad, I need to tell you something. And, well, it's going to be a bit difficult to believe some parts of it."

Clara didn't waste much time getting to the big reveal. They'd arrived, exchanged handshakes and hugs as appropriate, poured a round of cocktails - even the Doctor accepted one, though both he and Clara left theirs untouched - and sat down with a spread of crackers, cheeses, and biscuits on the coffee table between them.

The Doctor was doing his damnedest to restrain his usual impulses toward the bizarre, which basically left him silent, which was probably all for the best. Clara and her father had always had a warm relationship, but not necessarily a very close one.

Dave regarded them both over the rim of his wineglass. "Well, I assumed there was something, since it was so important that Linda not be here tonight." Clara and her step-mother definitely had a cool relationship, and fortunately the latter was traveling on business this week.

The Doctor sat still, turning his glass in his hands but otherwise just silently projecting as much ardent support toward his Impossible Girl as he could.

Clara got up and moved around the table to sit on the couch beside her father. She turned toward him, took his hand, took a deep breath, and gave him an apprehensive smile.

"Dad. I'm pregnant."

Her father's eyebrows inched upward, but otherwise he was pretty expressionless as he took this in for a moment. He shot the Doctor a glance, who kept his face smooth.

"I see," responded Dave finally. "Well, I suppose that congratulations are in order, but honey, honestly, you don't seem very happy about it."

The Doctor felt a wave of protectiveness - of  _course_  she was happy; didn't he know that his daughter had looked forward to being a mum all her life? - but he reigned it in, for Clara's sake.

He knew she could hold her own anyway. "Actually, Dad, I am happy," she assured him. "It's telling you the rest of it that is making me nervous."

Now they'd piqued his interest and he gave the Doctor another sideways look. "Okay. What's the rest of it? There's something more than that you're pregnant?"

Clara squeezed his hands in appeal. "To tell the truth, it'd be easier to show you. Will you come outside with us for a moment?"

"Really?" Now Dave looked openly skeptical. "Honey, honestly, just tell me. Whatever it is, you know I love you. It can't be that bad."

Clara actually laughed at that. "Dad, if I told you, you seriously wouldn't believe me. Just come outside and see for yourself, and it will make explaining easier."

The Doctor stood in the hopes that it would provide a cue and get everyone moving. "Mr. Oswald, I know it sounds strange, but Clara's right. If you would indulge us for just one minute, literally one minute, the rest will be much easier to understand."

Still obviously reluctant, Clara's father allowed them to lead him outside to where the TARDIS awaited. Dave appeared openly irritated at being led to a police box, and Clara and the Doctor exchanged a glance as she took out her key and unlocked the door.

"Clara, honestly, honey, what  _is_  this? And when did they install a police box around the corner anyway? This has never been here before."

With a final deep breath, Clara opened the door and led her father into the console room of the TARDIS.

The Doctor had, in his thousand years, been through this moment hundreds of time with hundreds of people. For once, however, he had absolutely no urge to gloat, show off, pontificate, or otherwise milk the occasion. This one was all Clara's to run, and the Doctor stood to the side.

Dave froze inside the door, eyes wide as he stared around the console room. Clara waited beside him, watching him nervously. After a long moment, her father spun, strode back outside, and did the TARDIS circuit. Clearly establishing to his own satisfaction that he was, indeed, seeing what he thought he was seeing, he marched back into the console room and faced his daughter, bewilderment on his face.

"It's a spaceship, Dad. It just looks like a police box on the outside, like camouflage. You're literally standing inside of a spaceship, right now. If you wanted, we could take you into orbit and you could be looking down at the Earth from outer space in about thirty seconds from now."

Dave paled markedly. He opened his mouth as if he wanted to argue, but then closed it in the face of the evidence in front of his eyes.

"How… how is it bigger…?"

Here the Doctor finally spoke up. "My people developed technology quite a bit more advanced than humanity, Mr. Oswald." He clasped his hands together eagerly in a fashion that often preceding him launching into extended explanations, and Clara shot him a warning glance. He accordingly dialed it down a couple of notches. "It's called dimensional transcendentalism. It's sort of the spacial equivalent of the visual trick of forced perspective in a photograph or movie. Well, not exactly." He took a deep breath and stopped himself through force of will. "But pretty close," he concluded.

Dave had turned slowly to face him, though his eyes were still darting frequently about the room in disbelief. "Your… people?" he echoed weakly.

"I am from a planet called Gallifrey. My people are called Time Lords."

Clara's father was blinking rapidly, attempting to process. "Time Lords? You're… you're an alien. That's what you're both telling me. You're an alien." Suddenly his brain started to assemble a few puzzle pieces, and he spun back toward his daughter. "Clara! You're telling me that he's an alien. He's an alien! And you're pregnant!"

Clara took his hands again, reassuringly. "Dad, I know. It's a lot. I'm sorry to dump it all on you at once."

"Bloody hell, Clara!" His eyes were slightly wild now as he pulled away from her and began to pace the room, looking around. "Bloody hell. So your child is half, half-alien! Half-Time Lord! Why the hell are you called Time Lords anyway?"

Clara bit her lip and threw the Doctor a panicked look, but they'd agreed that there was nothing for it and all he could do was shrug helplessly. He'd found it was best just to get it all out there and move past it. Trying to dole out the shocks didn't actually tend to help that much.

"Well, Dad, it's a spaceship, but it's also a time machine. The Time Lords have developed time travel. You're, um, standing in it."

Dave threw up his hands and barked a laugh. "Am I now? Of course I am! Time travel as well, is it? My daughter is pregnant, and her boyfriend is apparently a time-traveling alien! My god, what a day!"

Now it was the Doctor's turn to glance nervously at Clara, wondering if her father really was going to go off the deep end. But then, surprisingly, Dave's bark of outrage turned into a genuine, only-slightly-hysterical chuckle, which segued in turn into a round of true, extended belly laughter.

Clara giggled hesitantly for a moment, then joined in for real. The Doctor looked on, bemused.

The two Oswalds came together and Clara's father wrapped his arms around her as they both continued to laugh uncontrollably. After another moment they were wiping tears from their eyes, and one would begin to trail off and then re-erupt after exchanging another look with the other.

Humans. Bizarre, the lot of them.

After a while Dave slowly wound down and Clara with him, and they were standing arm in arm, wiping their faces dry and slowly re-composing themselves. The Doctor leaned against a railing, arms crossed, waiting.

Dave looked at him. "Well, you  _look_  human. So I guess that means that the baby will look human. Right?"

The Doctor chanced an amused shrug. "He'll look Time Lord to me, Mr. Oswald. You lot all do."

Thankfully Dave didn't appear to take any offense. Now that he'd gotten through his fit, he seemed remarkably composed. But then, Clara had gotten her quick mind and resilient temperament from somewhere.

"He? But you can't know that yet, right? You don't find that out 'til halfway through."

"He can travel through space and time, Dad. They know how to tell the sex from the beginning."

Finally, a look of plain old delight crossed Dave Oswald's face. "A boy! You're going to have a boy!" With that, he leaned over the planted a kiss on his daughter's forehead, then reached out and gripped Clara's arms with a grin. "Clara, you are going to be a  _brilliant_  mum! You were absolutely born for this, you know that?"

Clara's answering smile warmed the Doctor's hearts, and he was relieved that Clara was finding a happy reception to the most important one of her revelations.

The she looked up at her father seriously, and took his hands again. "Dad, I know that the alien stuff isn't something that any sane father would be happy to hear, I understand that. But the Doctor is actually a good man, Dad.  _He's_  the kind of man you would want for me. I hope you'll remember that, as you try to make sense of all this."

Her words seemed to strike her father deeply, and for a moment he looked almost shocked, then a thoughtful smile returned to his face. "All right, honey," he said slowly. "I'll try to remember that."

They embraced again, and then Dave Oswald seemed to find it in himself to come over and shake the Doctor's hand. "Well, I'd be lying if I said that it doesn't bother me that you're an alien. But I've always trusted Clara's judgment, and she's always had a good head on her shoulders. But it looks like you're going to be the father of my grandson, and Clara tells me that you are a good man. So tell me, son, do you plan to do right by my daughter?"

Clara actually gasped out loud in outrage, though it took the Doctor an extra beat to take the man's meaning. "Dad-" Clara was snapping, but the Doctor couldn't help himself, he laughed in genuine amusement.

"Mr. Oswald, your daughter is the mother of my child and I love her very, very much. We have a word for that in Gallifreyan, and I think it's fair to say that the best human translation of that word is 'wife.' We do not have lavish wedding customs like humans do, and I have no legal identity on your world with which to enact any legal proceedings. But if you're asking me if I intend to treat Clara as my wife, then I have no hesitation in telling you  _yes_ , of course I do."

The Doctor threw a grin at Clara, who was staring at him slack-jawed and dumb. He couldn't remember ever having seen Clara completely speechless before.

But his speech had had the desired effect on Dave Oswald, who shook the Doctor's hand a final time, but this time with some actual warmth. Clara and her father embraced and took a moment saying goodbye, during which the Doctor waited with uncharacteristic patience, arms folded as he thought about their conversation.

Clara closed the TARDIS door behind her father, then turned back toward the Doctor and fixed him on the spot with her suddenly hot gaze.

The Doctor raised an eyebrow at her. "Well hello, Clara Oswald."

Clara stalked toward him with an openly appraising look on her face, tearing her jumper over her head and dropping it on the floor. "Wife, eh?" Her voice was low.

The Doctor grinned as he raked her body with his eyes. "Wife, indeed," he responded as he straightened his bowtie and took a step forward to meet her in a searing kiss.


	17. Chapter 17

Usually they made it out of the console room… the Doctor had random fits of claiming that having sex here was somehow disrespectful to the TARDIS, but Clara had noticed that he seemed to find it particularly hot on other occasions. Happily, the TARDIS had warmed to Clara completely since she saved the Doctor's lives, and an impromptu orgasm up against the rails no longer led to cold water in the shower.

At any rate, today was not the day that they were going to relocate, because Clara was using every trick that she'd already known and every trick that she'd learned along the way in the last couple of months. She discarded her bra as quickly as she had her jumper, making sure the Doctor's fingers found her already-stiff nipples. She buried her hands in his thick hair as she kissed him, tugging lightly. She bit his collarbone, closing her teeth gently, and bared her throat to his teeth in turn. Within two minutes, the Doctor was tearing his own clothes off - just the necessary ones, leaving him in a state of disarray that Clara had come to particularly enjoy - and pushing her to her knees.

Fortunately for Clara, giving the Doctor head was a long, leisurely process, and she was able to bring herself off multiple times while she pushed him through a slow build to his own. He had his hands tangled in her hair, guiding her, pushing himself deep into the back of her throat. The Doctor was often at his most demanding when Clara was on her knees for him, and she worked hard to relax every time he started to push in deep, sometimes looking up at him from under her lashes and meeting his eyes as she gagged lightly.

And of course, he was in the mood for mind games. The feedback loop of desire snapped into place instantly whenever they had skin contact - sometimes at inopportune moments - but he was able to use his telepathy in quite a few other ways and often did so. Today, every time he pushed into the back of her throat and held himself there, he plucked at the pathways that magnified her sense of choking, just slightly. Just enough to bring on a small, temporary rush of panic, which he then fed into the feedback loop to push it higher. She knew what he was doing - could feel his fingers in her mind - but knowing that it was a trick didn't really stop the moment of alarm that happened every time he pushed deep. And indeed, both of Clara's orgasms hit her just as she was sputtering and trying to push back off of him, in spite of him holding her head in place with his grip on her hair.

"You are some kind of evil genius," he groaned, obviously luxuriating in the feeling of her throat convulsing around the head of his cock. He was, of course, of formidable size for this sort of thing, though he was able to forestall the swelling that stretched Clara so intensely right before he came inside of her during intercourse.

Clara hummed her agreement, feeling him shudder in response to the vibrations. She knew that he was close when words began to fall out of his mouth mindlessly, words of ownership and possession and desire. Except that now, every so often, he muttered something about her carrying his son, further evidence that her pregnancy was exciting to him on more than one level. She found herself turned on by the very fact that it turned him on, and from there it was mere seconds to the Doctor grabbing her hair tightly and pushing all the way to the back of her throat and holding her there as he came in her mouth. Clara relaxed as fully as she could to avoid aspirating, letting his seed fill her mouth and throat without attempting to swallow or spit until he was finished.

He fell into a sort of controlled collapse as he finally released her, dragging her down to the floor, halfway into his lap, in a tangle of limbs and clothing. Immediately he pulled her back into a deep, rough kiss, obviously not caring about his own taste on her lips. He flipped her on her back and slid a hand between her thighs, making sure that she came one final time before letting them both float gently back down to reality.

It was long moments before either of them found anything coherent to say.

"Well, I'd say that that went well," Clara finally volunteered, shifting slightly to unbind some remnant of a garment that had twisted uncomfortably in their passion.

"Telling your father, or the celebratory blow job afterwards?"

Clara laughed… it often tickled her to hear the Doctor use idiomatic human terms for sex. Except when they were having it, when it was usually just hot. "I suppose I meant the former, but the latter wasn't a bad use of time either."

The Doctor gave her a crooked grin. "And did I earn that by proclaiming you my wife?" he asked impishly.

Clara found herself blushing deeply, which was kind of funny response given that she was already pregnant with his child. But for some reason she had truly not yet considered whether that changed how he saw their relationship. Or how she did.

She hid her face behind her hair. "Maybe," she admitted reluctantly.

He tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear with a tender touch. " _Asawa_ ," he said softly, tapping a playful finger on the tip of her nose.

Her blush intensified further... she'd always loved hearing him speak his native language, and while she had a hard time speaking it fluently in conversation with her human tongue, she could understand him fairly well and use some of the words with ease.  _Asawa_. Wife as well as husband in Gallifreyan. The word that meant loving-parent-to-my-child and passionate lover all in one.

Clara sat up and peered at him. "But… what about…?" He didn't seem inclined to guess, just gazing at her expectantly. "…River?" she finally finished, awkwardly.

The Doctor didn't seem discomfited by his former wife's name. "Clara, River died centuries ago in my personal timeline. I've had some time to grieve."

She nodded shyly. "But… we could meet her again, couldn't we?"

The Doctor halfway sat up himself, and idly began to rebutton his various garments. "Well, she was a time traveller. I can't promise you that we won't. But she always understood that if she encountered me too far out from the years that we spent together, that my hearts might have been claimed by another by then. Besides, River was never territorial in that way. Should we ever bump into her again, she might not realize how long it's been at first, but she'll figure it out quickly. And she'll still be gallivanting around with younger versions of me, so it shouldn't be such a heartbreak for her. She was with me until the end of her life."

Clara played with a button on her skirt. "But what about you? Wouldn't that be hard on you? To think of her as dead, but see her again?"

He paused, now, and looked at her seriously. "Clara, I would be lying if I said that I hadn't loved River very, very much. I did, and others before her too. So yes, of course it would be hard to see her again. But that's not because of you. She knew that I couldn't go on falling into her arms, never knowing if I'd encounter her one more time. She wouldn't have wanted me to live in limbo forever."

"Well, fair enough." Clara tried to accept this at face value, as the Doctor climbed to his feet and helped Clara to hers as well.

He leaned down and kissed her on the forehead as he helped her re-dress herself. "River was an amazing woman, and she saved my life. She was indeed my wife, in her way, for a century, but she was not my  _asawa_. It's funny, she may have been more Gallifreyan than you in her DNA, but much less so in her mind and spirit. She never saw my home, didn't speak my language. I need you to understand, Clara… I am so grateful that it is you,  _you_ , who is going to help me raise my son.  _You_  are my wife now, whether we use the word or not."

" _Asawa_ ," Clara whispered back, gazing up at him.

"That's right," the Doctor agreed, straightening her collar. "And  _mine_."

* * *

The next few weeks passed uneventfully… now that Clara knew how to keep the nausea at bay, she felt so much like her usual self that she found that she often didn't feel pregnant. She was grateful that she knew how check in on the baby herself, and the Doctor usually peeked in at least nightly when Clara was unwinding for sleep. In the warm, fragrant room that symbolized Clara's womb, the little ball of light had grown brighter and warmer, and had burrowed in among the ivy on the wall. It had also begun to flicker, rapidly, the double heartbeat of a new Time Lord.

They had settled into their little Victorian home, though Clara strongly suspected that the Doctor was often running about the universe or puttering inside the TARDIS when she was at Coal Hill teaching during the days. She found herself often whisked away to other planets and other times for dinner, shopping, or various adventures, though for once the Doctor truly was being a little more conscientious about what he dragged them into.

And the sex? As time went by and Clara's belly showed the first signs of swelling, it was more and more often the Doctor who initiated their intimacy instead of letting Clara's healthy libido set the pace. Almost every night he insisted on making her come at least once or twice, not that Clara, swimming in new hormones as she was, particularly objected. By now they had fallen to it on dozens of planets across the universe. Almost every day she bore his love-bites and other marks of his passion, as they seemed to bring out a love of roughness in one another. Clara was realizing that his protectiveness and his possessiveness were all tied up when it came to her, and that the more he wanted to keep her safe, the more he wanted to push what he was allowed to do to her himself.

She had picked up a selection of scarves and other high-necked blouses in their travels - who could have guessed how often she would wind up wearing extra-terrestrial clothing to work? She had begun to dress in an increasingly Gallifreyan fashion, an impulse that she presumed to be related to carrying a Gallifreyan child. She hit the mark in blending the styles of her adopted homeworld with her own, still favoring short skirts and tights, but now often topping them with structured, high-necked tunics and jackets. Without saying anything about it, the Doctor increasingly took her to markets where she could easily find such items, and she certainly caught him regarding her with open lust when she dressed in this fashion. She also often braided or twisted her hair in more elaborate fashions than human women tended to wear, which he took great pleasure in tearing apart at the first chance he got.

It was a Wednesday, and she was in her empty classroom at Coal Hill after the students had been dismissed, cleaning her boards and singing a Gallifreyan lullaby under her breath, when she heard a footfall behind her and a lightly cleared throat.

"Clara?"

She turned on her heel and gave Tom a friendly smile, which faltered when she noticed how sober his expression was. They'd managed to maintain a fairly warm and friendly work relationship in the year or so since Tom had asked her out on a date, so she was not surprised to find him swinging by her classroom at the end of the day, but the look on his face was not his usual shy smile.

"Can I talk to you?"

Clara frowned, looking him over, and gestured for him to take the seat by her desk. She settled in as well, folding her hands and regarding him expectantly. "Is everything okay, Tom?"

He swallowed hard, clearly once again working up his courage. She couldn't imagine that he was going to try asking her out again. Not after that last fiasco.

"Well, this is awkward, but I've been thinking about it a lot, and I feel like I need to bring it up. Clara, I've been growing worried about you."

Clara tilted her head, bemused. "Really? Why is that?" It was surprising, given what a good mood she'd been in at work for the last few weeks.

Tom did, indeed, look uncomfortable, but pushed forward. "Clara, I don't mean to pry. I know that you've made clear to me that your business is your own."

"Okay," she drawled slowly. "And yet…?"

He sat forward. "Well, I realize that you don't want anyone to notice this, but I guess I pay closer attention to you than I'm supposed to. Because - well, because I still care about you. And… well… I'm sorry, Clara, but I can't help noticing that you're trying to conceal bruises, on your neck or wrists, sometimes."

"Oh!" Clara colored immediately, highly embarrassed. She had always been a pretty sexually liberated girl and loved how passionate her relationship with the Doctor had become - who could have seen that coming? - but getting called out on it at work was sort of rattling her.

"Tom." Clara leaned forward, realizing that this conversation was about to get even more awkward, considering that not that very long ago, she had explained in detail to Tom that she wouldn't go out on a date with him because she was never going to date again. "I realize that that must look kind of bad, and sort of unprofessional to boot, the latter of which I'm glad to immediately remedy." She was going to have to ask the Doctor to try to leave the hollows behind her ears free of his little love-bites no matter how tender the skin there was. "But I promise, Tom, it's not what it looks like. I'm… it's totally consensual. Seriously."

Tom was clearly unconvinced. "Clara, can I ask you something?"

Uh-oh. Alarm bells were going off. "Uh, what?"

He picked at some invisible lint on the leg of his trousers. "Are you pregnant?"

"What?" Clara almost stood up, then forced herself to sit back and take a breath. "What… why would you ask me that?" She was barely showing at all, and was consciously, carefully dressing to hide her very small tummy.

Now it was Tom's turn to look embarrassed. "Well, I told you, I probably pay more attention to you than I should. You were green every day a couple of weeks ago, and then last week when we all went out for a drink after work, you ordered a tonic and cran, so it would look like you were having a cocktail."

Honestly, Clara didn't even know if alcohol would be bad for her half-Time Lord baby, and kept meaning to and forgetting to ask the Doctor about it.

But Tom went on. "I know you're not showing much, but once I got the idea in my head, I've sort of been looking. And I think maybe you are."

Clara's sputtered non-answer was answer enough, she knew. Damn it. And she was supposed to keep her pregnancy under wraps at work.

"It's just that… again, I know it's none of my business. But you know, when you're with a man who… has a temper, you know. Well. That tends to get worse, if a woman gets pregnant."

Clara was now properly mortified. Tom thought that she was being abused, and worse than that, that it was getting worse because she was pregnant. Which he wasn't supposed to know, anyway. She opened and shut her mouth, fishing about for something reasonable to say. Every thing that occurred to her, when she test-ran it inside of her head, sounded exactly like a battered woman making excuses for her batterer.

"Tom," she managed, then ran out of steam. "Tom," she started again, gesturing at him with a pencil. "Well. Tom, I'm very appreciative of your concern, really I am, but I promise you that it's misplaced. I know that 'it's not what it looks like' is exactly what actual victims always say, but you're just going to have to trust me that it's  _really_  not what it looks like. I mean,  _really_  not."

He looked openly skeptical. "Clara… is it the same man?"

She knew immediately what he meant. The "same man" who was the reason she had turned Tom down a year ago, the guy who she had claimed hadn't worked out, and meant that she would never date again.

Well, yeah. It was. But not like he thought it was.

But once again, her sudden inability to convincingly lie on the fly bit her in the arse, as Tom was clearly drawing his own conclusions from Clara's evasive discomfort.

As if on cue, Clara heard her name being called from outside the room, and closed her eyes as a massive headache suddenly manifested. What the bloody hell was he doing here? He wasn't supposed to come to Coal Hill.

The Doctor skidded into the room in his highest-energy state, she could already tell from the madness in his eyes and his hair all out of place. "Clara," he called again. "I'm sorry to come get you at work, but it really couldn't wait! We have to get to Gerameragona - oh, hello!"

Tom stood stiffly, eyeing the Doctor with plain hostility on his face. Clara stood too, for lack of anything else to do. She didn't think she could get any redder or more flustered.

"Hello, there, dear." She had no idea whether to use his name or not, or to even try to invent a cover store now that Tom had revealed how much he'd discerned.

The Doctor hauled up short and regarded them with interest. "Hello, Clara," he said in slightly calmer tones. "And your friend is…?"

Clara looked between them helplessly. "This is Tom. He teaches maths."

The Doctor approached and held out a hand, which Tom shook with obvious reluctance.

"John," said the Doctor smoothly, as if he were offering his name. "Clara has mentioned you, Tom. She said you've been a good friend to her."

Tom looked taken aback. "That's strange, she hasn't really mentioned you. I'm sorry, are you her boyfriend?" Clara was actually a little impressed with such forwardness from meek little Tom, though she cursed it at the moment.

The Doctor didn't even blink. "I'm a good friend, Tom. That's why I so appreciate how much kindness you've shown Clara here. Now I'm so sorry that I've interrupted you, but I'm afraid that I require Clara's company for an important matter so I'm forced to whisk her away from you. You understand."

It was the Doctor at his smoothest as he was escorting Tom out the door with an arm around his shoulders. He shot a sharp look at Clara, clearing ordering her to follow, and the Doctor was gently urging Tom right out the door.

Tom turned with an irritated look on his face. "Well, then. Good evening, Clara. John. Have a nice night." He turned and stalked away, and the Doctor smiled and waved as he closed Clara's classroom door behind him.

Clara was surprised when the Doctor suddenly turned and took her by the upper arms. "What did I interrupt, Clara?"

She'd not yet truly regained her composure from Tom's interrogation, and now Clara was a little overwhelmed by the Doctor's forceful manner. She lowered her eyes and looked up at him from under her lashes.

"He's figured out that I'm pregnant. And he noticed some bruises from the other night, and he thinks I'm being… battered." Clara found that it came out in a whisper.

The Doctor's eyes widened, and after a moment he laughed. "Oh, that's rich. Clara.  _My_  Clara. Am I abusing you, my dear?"

His manner was cheeky, and Clara found herself finally starting to calm down. In fact, his closeness was already arousing her, and he moved in closer, shaking her gently by his hold on her upper arms. Certainly not enough to bruise, that pressure. But being casually manhandled by him was always sort of a turn on, and she felt the usual sort of melty response, and knew he felt it too by his smile.

"I don't think abuse is a very good word for what you're doing to me," she breathed, again looking up and meeting his eyes.

"Oh?" He looked interested, pulled her toward him, her body flush against his. "Then what would be a better word for what I'm doing to you?"

She felt her heart speeding up, her knickers already moistening. Speaking of being the Impossible Girl, it had been impossible ever since Trenzalore to keep a dry set of knickers around him, even after they'd effectively dismantled the immediate effects of the glamour. By then they'd been lovers, and she'd been madly in love with him. She just didn't think that she would ever get enough of him.

She searched for an answer to his question. "Oh, maybe… claiming?" He smiled at her use of one of his favorite near-orgasm words. She pitched her voice lower. "Sometimes, dominating." She drew the word out, looking suitably submissive. It wasn't difficult, with him holding her like this. "Always arousing," she finished, sliding her hands around his neck to find some skin contact, knowing he would instantly feel how turned on she was.

His smile had a predatory edge. "Oh, Clara," he sighed. "Do you know, I'm finding that I  _really don't like_  having to pretend to be your 'good friend'?"

"I'm sorry?" She found herself confused by the change in the direction of the conversation.

"I want to keep our family safe, Clara, but I'm finding that I really don't like having you working here all day and all these people thinking that you're a single woman." He was holding her gaze, his eyes hot and a little angry. "That's the bloke who asked you out last year, didn't you tell me that? And now he thinks I'm abusing you? I just don't think this is going to work."

She blinked up at him. "So… do you want me to tell them? About us, I mean? Not who you are."

He cupped her cheek with his large hand and she almost automatically tilted her head into it. She'd never been particularly submissive in bed before, but something about him… she didn't think it was the glamour, either. It was just their chemistry.

He considered her question for a moment, running his thumb gently over Clara's lower lip. Her lips parted for him; again, it just seemed the natural thing to do.

"I think that, if you're going to work here, maybe I'm going to have to put a bloody ring on that finger of yours after all. I want everyone who's going to be around you every day to think of you as  _mine_ , Clara. And as our child's mother." He lowered his head to the hollow of her throat and nipped lightly at her. "I want everyone here to know that if there is a bite mark on your neck, that it was  _your husband_  who put it there, and that it is none of their. Goddamned. Business."

Clara moaned softly, closing her eyes with frustration at the knowledge that it wasn't yet late enough for the building to be empty of students. She didn't know if he was serious about the ring, but she sure as hell knew that they were heading toward something that was not appropriate for a schoolroom.

The Doctor seemed to be reading her mind - maybe he was, they  _were_  still touching - and he released her to grab his sonic screwdriver and take a swipe at the door. Clara heard the latch drive itself home. He waved it over each shoulder and the windows went white as if they suddenly frosted over. Clara groaned with regret, knowing there was no way she was going to get him back to the TARDIS first now. This was apparently going to happen here, where it would be a  _really_  bad idea to be discovered.

Which was probably why he was doing it.

"There is a ring in Gallifreyan custom, too, do you remember?" he asked in a low voice, walking her back a few steps to her desk and lifting her up to place her bum on its edge. He grabbed her skirt and hitched it up, then used one hip to separate her knees and wedge his body between her thighs all the way flush up against her moist knickers.

Clara did remember. Time Lords and Ladies who were spoken for did not wear rings on their fingers. They chose a place for a piercing, and wore their symbol penetrating their flesh. Most chose to wear an earring, but a few chose more adventurous locations. It was the only jewelry that most Time Lords and Ladies wore on a daily basis.

The Doctor slid a hand under the edge of her tunic and ran it up over her ribs to her breast. He pulled down the edge of her lace bra and tweaked Clara's nipple. "Maybe here, what do you think? My ring here, for us, and a human ring on your finger, for them? Then everyone would know that you're spoken for."

It wasn't something that Clara had ever imagined for herself, but the idea of it being the  _Doctor's_  ring through her nipple was actually pretty sexy. "For you? Yes. Of course."

He played with her nipple as he gazed down at her, teasing it into a puckered state with his fingers. "Well, maybe not. Our son will have needs of his own, when it comes to this part of you. That's too bad… I think you would look good with a ring here. Maybe after he's weaned." He slid his hand back down her body, slipped it between her legs and lightly traced it over her mons, fingers trailing over her knickers. "Maybe here, then. I want it to be somewhere… meaningful."

She gasped, arched toward him, looking up at him impertinently. "You mean  _sexual_."

The Doctor grinned. "Yes, that's what I mean."

Clara couldn't help it, she found herself rocking against his hand between her thighs. The friction was too delicious to ignore.

"Do you know, Doctor," Clara said breathlessly, "that before we became lovers, I  _never_  would have believed in a million years what an  _incredible pervert_  you are?"

The Doctor gave her a look of mock outrage as he continued to work on her body. "Pervert? Clara Oswald, don't you realize that it's entirely your fault? You're the one who brings it out in me."

She almost laughed, but it segued into a low moan. "Ah, Doctor… I can't believe the things that you bring out in me…"

His eyes flashed. "Like the sudden, unexpected desire to let me put a ring in your labia, you mean?" he asked, pushing in against the flimsy fabric of her knickers.

"Like that," she admitted. Clara lifted her knees, hooking her ankles over his hips, leaning back on the desk, and abandoned herself to the coming orgasm at his hands. "And this," she added, no longer caring about the fact that they really, really shouldn't be doing this here.

She came with his name on her lips, and he pulled her forward and buried her face against his jacket to muffle her cries.


	18. Chapter 18

It was during her second visit with the midwife that Clara got her first real chance to talk with someone other than the Doctor about all the strange developments in her life.

The Doctor had dropped her off, of course - Clara couldn't get to Edmee on her own - and even came into the appointment with her to confirm Mary's opinion that their son was growing as he should be. Mary again told them that Clara was in optimal health and her pregnancy was flourishing.

The midwife then turned to the Doctor and asked if he would feel comfortable leaving them for a longer talk. Clara wondered if this was another display of her fantastic intuition. The Doctor, usually so protective of Clara, seemed to trust Mary, and left with no grumbling to amuse himself back at the market.

Mary turned back to Clara, and for the first time Clara noticed that the midwife's eyes were as lavender as her skin. And full of concern.

"Is there anything that you'd like to talk about? About your pregnancy, or your son, or your relationship? I am here to support you in anything that will help you have a healthy child."

After her recent talk with Tom, Clara actually felt a little skittish in the face of Mary's obvious concern. She  _did_  kind of want to talk, really, but she was worried that Mary was freaked out by obviously having discerned the Doctor's identity. It was kind of difficult to fly under the radar when you were the last Time Lord in existence, and so many worlds had been impacted by the Last Great Time War.

"He's a good man," Clara said, defensively.

Mary's gaze softened, and she reached out and covered Clara's hands with her own. "I know. I can sense that."

"You've figured out who he is."

"Yes, of course." She spoke gently. "Our sisterhood has records of caring for many Time Ladies during their pregnancies, including your husband's mother, as a matter of fact. Edmee was mostly protected during the Time War, but all of the star-faring civilizations of time and space knew of it. And we have heard the stories of how it ended."

Clara searched her face, looking for traces of judgment. No, no real judgment, just concern.

"He did what he had to do, to preserve the universe. He's saved so many more lives than he lost that day."

Mary held up her hands. "Clara, you do not need to defend him to me. I would be lying if I said that he does not scare me, but fortunately it is not my place to sit in judgment of him. I only want to know how you are."

Clara relaxed, allowing herself to sit back in her chair. Actually, it felt really nice to be asked, by someone she could answer. "So you really can't break our confidentiality?"

Mary smiled warmly. "No. Never. I never will, and could not if I wished to. You can share anything with me, Clara, and know that it will go with me to my grave someday, hopefully far in the future."

"Well." Clara glanced around the small office, wondering what it was that she wanted to say. "Everything has happened… quickly, you know? We didn't plan all this."

Mary sat silent, letting Clara take her time.

"Now that it's happened, though, it's the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me. Traveling with the Doctor… it's been a wild ride. From the first. But…" Here she took a moment, searching for her words. "I'm sure I fell in love with him right away, but never thought that anything would come of it. I always knew he loved me too - he falls in love easily, the Doctor. He's not very much like the man that the legends describe, I don't think."

Clara's gaze was faraway now, remembering. "I always knew he loved me, but I never thought that he'd love me like this. And then, when once in a while I allowed myself to imagine it, I always thought that even if it happened, that I'd always wonder… how could he  _really_  love a human girl? My lifespan will be a fraction of his. His brain is capable of so many things that ours are not. The Time Lords were so advanced compared to humanity. And then…"

Clara suddenly looked around the room, as if someone else might by listening. Mary was still attentive, waiting. Clearly trusting Clara to get where she was going.

Clara took a deep breath. "… and then I did something, something that changed everything. I really… I can't tell you what it was, Mary, even though I believe you that you'll keep our secrets. But what I did… it ripped me into pieces, and reassembled me as a whole new person. I mean… I'm still Clara Oswald, but now I'm also more than Clara Oswald. And what I did, it made all of  _this_ possible."

Mary gazed at her. "Your mind is more than human, Clara. I can feel that."

Clara nodded, surprised to feel her eyes filling with tears, and not quite sure why.

"And you are still haunted by what you did," Mary suggested, accurately.

"I always will be," Clara blurted suddenly, startled to hear herself say it. A tear streamed down her cheek, but she ignored it, feeling flooded with sudden relief to be saying these things out loud to someone other than the Doctor. "But - you have to understand. What I did… it made  _this_  possible." Here Clara put her hands protectively over the swell of her lower belly. Her voice was full of emotion now. " _My son_. The  _Doctor's_  son. Another Time Lord, after all this time!  _I_  made that possible."

Mary nodded, regarding her compassionately. "But you paid a high price for it."

Clara almost seemed to collapse in on herself. "I did. But it was worth it." There was a long moment of silence, during which Clara was lost in thought.

"He cares for you deeply, profoundly," said Mary. "He is very afraid of losing you. That is what haunts him."

Clara blinked, suddenly, a little startled by Mary's words. "You can sense that?"

"Yes. I do not understand it, Clara, but he believes that he has already lost you, many times over. It terrifies him, the idea of losing you one last time. It is why he is so very protective of you, and so very possessive."

Clara realized even as Mary was speaking how very true her words were. Yes. That was why the Doctor was sometimes so fierce with her. He had been forced to lose her so many times now, most of them frustratingly obscured from him as they occurred.

Clara left her meeting with new insight into the Doctor, her child's father, and now, she supposed, her husband-to-be.

* * *

The Doctor found himself perusing jewelry as he passed the time waiting for Clara to return.

He wanted something plain but pretty, functional. He didn't know if Clara had been the sort of girl to dream about a big white dress and a fancy diamond in her girlhood, but somehow he thought she'd been too busy with planning her future adventures for that sort of thing. After all, he'd spent a great deal of time in her mind, often encountering figments of her fantasy world, and had never come across anything of the sort.

He was still having a hard time believing that he was going to be a father after all these years. He was astonished at his luck, though he hated to think of the repeated deaths that Clara suffered as being to his benefit. Although in the very most literal sense they had been, but additionally, they had provided him with a mother for his child who knew his language and customs and remembered his home world.

He was terrified of not being able to protect them, his family. It was his responsibility to keep them safe… it wasn't Clara who had spent the last millennium running about the universe, making enemies, and generally behaving like an intergalactic wag. Well, she kind of had - the first two anyway - but that was his fault too. He was desperate to find a way to keep them safe that wouldn't stifle Clara so much that she felt like she couldn't have some kind of normal life.

And in the end, he was bound to lose her anyway. Even if he was successful, even if no harm ever came to a hair on her head, he would be lucky to have, what, a hundred more years with her? She would have access to medical care that was beyond the imaginings of humans of her own time, and she was an effortlessly fit and healthy woman. And still, in the end, he would stand over her grave, though he admitted that there was a small comfort in imagining that he would not be standing there alone any more. Their son would have the lifespan of a Time Lord, and the Doctor would have someone to love who wouldn't wither in a fraction of his lifetime.

He wished there were a way to keep Clara with him, too. Humanity in its future would learn to expand their lifetimes somewhat, and even find many ways to do so healthily, but as far as he knew, no one would ever find a way to break the 200-year mark without making some seriously unwise physiological bargains.

This was why he didn't mate with human women.

Yet he couldn't regret what he had done with Clara. He truly couldn't. She was smart, funny, beautiful, brave, and beginning to grow with his son. She provoked an intensity of desire in him that he hadn't felt since he was a young man, and she was a match for that intensity, both yielding to it and meeting him in it. She was an angel, Clara. She was his angel, and he had defiled her for it, and she had screamed his name in appreciation as her nails dug into his back.


	19. Chapter 19

He took her to Taku to make an honest woman of her.

Taku was, in his well-informed opinion, the most beautiful untouched world in the universe. With all the planets in existence, many offered geological wonders to quicken the pulse, Earth among them. But of course, many of the most breathtaking planets attracted visitors. A few, however, had been overlooked, left alone, and Taku was the Doctor's favorite.

The Doctor parked the TARDIS deep in a rocky, wooded valley.

He raced below to get himself dressed for a wedding. He knew his Clara, and knew that she would be wearing something strongly Gallifreyan in flavor. He wanted to complement her by showing up in white tie. He thought the contrast - each of them dressed in the garb of the other's homeworld - was somehow poetic.

And of course, somehow, Clara had found the one dress that could top that amazing thing that she had worn on their "first date" all those months ago. Many of her dresses had some subtle Gallifreyan influences to them, but this one looked like Clara had somehow broken through the time lock and gone back to his homeworld to find her wedding dress. She wore shades of bright and dark red as usual, much of it in delicate lace that barely concealed the shadows of the curves of her body. The only deviation was the scandalously short skirt, which showed off her fabulous legs to excellent advantage. And the high waist actually emphasized instead of hid the early swelling of her belly.

He gazed at her, reminding himself that they had a few things to accomplish before he could bend her over something and consummate their union. Clara seemed equally transfixed, and the Doctor held out a hand to her, inviting her to him.

She came forward, with a beautiful smile on her lips and heat in her eyes.

Without a word, the Doctor led her from the TARDIS and into a wide fissure in one of the rocky walls of the valley. The footing was a little treacherous as they climbed downward into the ground, but the Doctor produced a torch to light the way, and Clara was naturally pretty steady on her feet. It was a long climb down, but worth it, and as they descended in silence, a sober mood seemed to come over them both.

After about twenty minutes he turned out the torch and, after a moment for their eyes to adjust, it was clear that the way down was now illuminated by a soft glow from below. They could now hear a faint rushing sound as well. The angle got a little steeper for a few moments, and then they suddenly emerged onto an outcropping that jutted into a vast, underground cavern here below the surface.

Down below them, the floor of the cavern had somehow accumulated a thick layer of soil, and rich vegetation filled the lower half of the cavern. Across from them the source of the dull roar was revealed to be a small river that emerged from the rock wall a hundred feet up - far above them - and crashed down to a pool below.

But the true spectacle was that everything - from the very walls of the grotto itself, to the cascading waters of the fall, to the foliage below - was glowing as if with inner light, in every color of the rainbow. The walls glinted and sparkled in the glow, as if they were dappled with precious gems. Strangely there was a soft breeze, and the rustling of the leaves below seemed to create a soft play of low, melodic tones. It was like a fairy tale, and the Doctor was gratified by Clara's open awe and astonishment.

"Minerals," the Doctor explained in soft tones. "The geology of this planet has some unusual properties that allow the minerals to infuse the living things as well as the strata of the rocks. They also contribute to the music."

He carefully picked his way down, often holding Clara's hand to steady them both. It took a while to find a path down to the floor of the cavern, but with patience they were able to make their way to the mossy meadow beside the pool at the base of the falls.

Down below, the Doctor turned and clasped Clara's hands. "As far as I know, we are the only two living beings in the universe who have ever seen this place." It had been important to him, to bring her somewhere special, somewhere private to the two of them. He had been traveling so long that of course he had shared most of his favorite destinations with multiple companions over time - it just seemed natural to him to do so. But for this? It wouldn't have done.

Clara's voice was equally hushed. "Doctor, this is perfect. You are brilliant." Her eyes sparkled as if they were also reflecting the minerals that shone throughout the grotto.

He thought that it would be tacky to repeat his trick with the bowtie, but he still felt a hand fasting was appropriate, especially as it was common the the cultures of both of their homeworlds. Accordingly he produced an appropriate length of undyed cord from one of his pockets, and deftly bound Clara's right hand to his own. Then he helped her kneel, and joined her, facing each other on their knees on the warm, glowing pink and yellow moss that carpeted the meadow, bound together.

He paused, then, for several long moments. He and Clara gazed at each other, feeling their heartbeats begin to synchronize - two of his for every one of hers. Their minds brushed fleetingly, then brushed again, then alighted. They were allowing the psychic connection to establish itself naturally, rather than constructing it, allowing it to deepen slowly, through patience and time. Their bodies followed, and of course their strong mutual attraction began to loop into a certain level of arousal, but it felt like a genuine aspect of their intense bond, rather than a distraction.

After a while the Doctor gingerly, carefully located just a couple of very important pathways in Clara's mind. He found the same pathways in his own, and he linked them directly to one another. It was very difficult to lie convincingly when in psychic contact like this, but now that he had linked them, it was literally impossible. They both could only speak or think the truth to one another until he broke the glamour.

It was time. The Doctor and Clara both took a deep breath, together. In synch.

He used the human phrasing, but he spoke to her in Gallifreyan. The pledge was short, but one of the most powerful in the universe, mighty in its simplicity. He spoke the words aloud, but the important part of the binding was happening on a psychic level. "I, the Doctor, of Gallifrey, take you, Clara Oswald, of Earth, to be my wedded wife, til death us depart, and thereto I plight thee my troth."

He kept his eyes open, locked on hers, as he began to weave the promise deftly between them. He was delighted by the ease with which Clara accepted the strands that he had coalesced from the ether between them - strands of tenderness, of roughness, of adoration, of respect, of passion, of kindness, of obsession - all the strands that they touched in each other when they were making love. He braided those strands together around and between them into the beginnings of an intricate latticework, and then laid each strand carefully across the open palms that she was holding out to him inside their minds.

Clara's eyes were moist, and she followed his lead easily, using the Gallifreyan phrasing but speaking her oath to him in English. "Doctor, I stand before thee on this day, and I make this pledge to thee: I shall uphold thy name. I shall honor thy wisdom. I shall raise up thy children well and kindly. I shall tend the gardens of our desire for one another. I shall show my love and my regard for thee above all others, through all the worlds of the universe and through all the days of time." He had not taught her these words. She knew them because she, like he, remembered them from one of her youths.

Somehow it was fitting. She had, indeed, proven her love for him though all the worlds of the universe and all the days of time. The words were more than ritual between them.

She was not as deft as he in continuing the weave, and in places she paused and he played across the weave with his own fingers to show her where to lay the strands next. But parts of it she constructed with no coaching while the Doctor waited and watched patiently, knowing how much it meant to them both that she could participate in this and not merely follow his lead.

Together the finished the weave, and they were both encompassed within the lattice. It held them firmly, as if they were suspended within a swing woven of their best intentions to take care of one another. The Doctor had been married several times in his long life, but it had been many, many centuries since the last time he had felt this.

The Doctor pulled Clara to him and leaned in, resting his forehead against hers. He let the cord fall away from their right hands, now producing the ring that he'd had the TARDIS manufacture for Clara… a nearly-indestructible but light alloy, a plain pale silvery-blue band with a square-cut sapphire - from Earth - set flush with the metal. It slipped onto her finger easily and looked lovely there.

He was speechless when Clara unexpectedly presented him with a ring of his own, as he instantly recognized it as a genuine Time Lord artifact - the High Gallifreyan glyphs for 'love,' 'passion' and 'commitment' inscribed onto a white band, which instantly resized itself to his finger as she slid it into place. He could not begin to imagine how she had gotten her hands on it, and he found himself blinking back his own tears.

They fell to the grass, then, immediately locked into a hungry kiss, their hands fumbling at each other's clothing. They were both in too hurried a state to be graceful about it, simply rucking one garment up and shoving another to the side in order to fit his body into the cradle of hers as quickly as possible. This was obviously an inadequate amount of preparation even with Clara's impressive talents, and it took them long moments of rocking together, still sealed in a kiss, to bring him fully home into her body. The glamour woven around and between them was driving them toward this moment, and as he slid into her to the hilt and held himself there, the whole construct suddenly lit up around them, both of their nervous systems with it.

He finally broke the kiss and pulled back to look at her. Now their gazes were locked, both wide, hers shocked, his blazing. Her breathing was getting away from her, and he found enough presence of mind to place a psychic fingertip lightly on the pathway that brought it back under control.

"This… it wasn't like  _this_  before," she whispered hoarsely.

He kept his own breathing even in spite of the surge of jealousy at the reminder that Clara had done this once before. "That's because it was the wrong man, Clara. It was always supposed to be me."

It was the first time that he'd referred to the glamour that he'd programmed into her at Trenzalore in a tone that was not apologetic, and he actually felt Clara's body respond. He wasn't being fair, but he knew they both still felt it. He began to thrust then, slowly at first, and with each return home, the tapestry around them pulsed in time, the colors layering on top of each other into an increasingly complex web, the energy building as if the whole thing were being electrified by their union. It was hijacking both of their brains, and the Doctor found the last remnants of his rational thought falling away before the power of the ritual that they were completing.

Pure, Time Lord instinct was taking over, and Clara was rising to the occasion, psychically relaxing into the compulsion that was gripping her nervous system. They both allowed the glamour to drive their urgent coupling, and with their bodies now on some sort of auto-pilot, their minds almost completely disbursed themselves into the weaving of their oaths that enveloped them.

It was powerful beyond imagining, and it was sheer bliss. To completely lose himself, to fly free of the burdens of being the Doctor, to mingle with Clara and all that she was and felt and had experienced, to release all of the constructs and pressures and rules that kept him one coherent being, to feel her flying equally, to lose track on any level of the difference between what was Doctor and what was Clara. They each felt this every time they orgasmed together - all that skin contact and his touch telepathy ensured it - but this time the disintegration was total, was consuming them alive, and they were both hurling themselves into it with all their hearts and minds and souls.

It was mad, and it was perfect.

They were both muttering, in English, in Gallifreyan, in other languages, in one another's minds. Her words spilled out of his mouth and his out of hers.

"Fuck me, fuck me hard, please don't stop," in his gravelly tones, and -

"Always mine, everything about you is mine, no one else is going to touch you  _ever again_ ," in hers…

She came first, him hard on her heels, both of their voices reverberating through the cavern, mingling with the rushing of the falls. The disorienting explosion of sensation, of color, of feeling, was all perfectly contained in the tapestry of the binding around them, and the Doctor felt himself spilling into Clara but nearly as acutely felt her sense of spasming hard around him.

But… but… there was no resolution. There was a powerful click between them, but it just dragged them and locked them into a new state of arousal rather than relieving it.

In the immediate aftermath the Doctor was able to discern that Clara was barely slowing down. She had come, but she'd barely paused in rising to meet him, and her eyes were completely unfocused.

 _More,_  one or both of them was thinking.  _Much more._

Reseating himself in some measure of control of the correct body, the Doctor pulled free of Clara's tight body, wrapped an arm around her waist and rolled her swiftly onto her stomach. She was having a hard time coordinating with him, and he impatiently nudged the correct pathways to get her tangled limbs working with him, feeling her confused arousal as she felt her body moving under his direction. He jerked her hips up at the same time that he pushed her onto her knees through her own nervous system, and within seconds he was sliding back home into her and the tapestry around them was reverberating with the building intensity of their lovemaking.

Now, though, he was on a mission, and he wasted no time sliding one hand over her hip, around her body, and deliberately plunging his fingers into the slickness between her thighs. Once he was satisfied, he inserted his slippery hand in between their bodies and then slid his thumb slowly upward to the cleft of her perfect little arse.

She gasped and bucked hard, almost pushing backward onto him as quickly as he was slipping a digit into her arse. Her body welcomed this new invasion, a loud groan escaping her as her upper body collapsed weakly all the way down to the mossy ground.

He wasn't done, though. Once his thumb was deep inside her, he leaned forward over her long, elegant back - pushing further into her arse from the pressure of his own hips - and slid his free hand up her spine, over her shoulder, and shoved two fingers unceremoniously into her wet, hot mouth.

"Inside you everywhere this time." He managed to get the words to come out of his own mouth, since hers was full now. "Inside you everywhere when you come again, Clara Oswald."

Her hungry body gave him all of the cues he needed even if their psyches hadn't been tangled into a single ocean of want and need now. She sucked his fingers greedily, pushing back hard against the unrelenting wall of his body behind her. In fact, for a moment, he stopped thrusting altogether, letting her do all the work, relishing her eagerness as she tried to pull/push him as deep into her - everywhere - as she could. He was inside her now, her pussy, her arse, her mouth, her brain, her heart, her womb.

She came again, tangled up in the intensity of his own response to that single thought.

He was inside her everywhere.

And she came around him, everywhere.

This time he held off his own climax, sinking deep into hers psychically instead so that they were nearly coming together inside of her one body. He could feel how deliciously, cataclysmically full she felt - so full, and still hungry, hungrily certain that she could take even more if he would only give it. Desperately hungry for him to fill her and stretch her and invade her until he ripped her into shreds.

Oh god, he didn't know - he clenched his jaw, hard, as Clara's body convulsed around his.

Somehow he managed to endure it, the force of her body's climax, without thundering after her. It was a Herculean feat, but he knew that he would have to come at least two more times before they were through, and some part of him knew that he had to pace himself at least a little.

Another sort of loud, hard psychic click between them as she finished, but as before, there was no moment of respite, no denouement, just another shove upward that locked them into a yet higher level of need. The filaments and strands woven all around them were thrumming loudly with energy now, the cacophony of their lovemaking resounding within the tapestry of their promises.

He had thrust himself forward hard as she came and they had both wound up flat on the ground, him on top of her. Clara suddenly rolled and the Doctor found himself unexpectedly dislodged from the tight heat of her body, and his soul cried out raggedly at the loss.

No matter, Clara understood what to do. She had him on his back in a heartbeat with uncharacteristic forcefulness, and it was delicious to feel his own sexual drive to dominate come through her and turn back on himself. Not that Clara was necessarily shy on her own - it was her strange combination of unabashed forwardness and easy submission that made her such an unusual bedmate - but the roughness with which she shoved him where she wanted him had much more of his own flavor about it than hers.

She was straddling him instantly, but surprisingly, facing his feet. She engulfed his now-throbbing erection quickly and he gasped as she turned and glanced at him wickedly over her shoulder, absolute madness dancing in her eyes.

"Your turn." He heard the words come out of his own mouth in a low, long groan, but they weren't his words, they were hers.

Then her fingers, oh god, her fingers, wet with saliva, her fingers were probing at his own body, repeating his trick, sliding into him, oh god it'd been lifetimes since he felt that particular nudge at his prostate, and his eyes rolled back in his head as Clara twisted her torso and flung her free hand back and slid two fingers of that hand between his parted lips as he gasped.

Oh bloody hell. Clara Oswald. OhbloodyhellClaraOswald. Oh bloody hell.

The tapestry around them was positively ablaze with energy and color and sound and light and delirium and desire and  _everything_... He felt his entire body bow beneath them, managing to lift them both off the mossy ground with an arch of everything from feet to head as he sucked greedily at her fingers. She was poised atop him between her two outstretched arms, and she worked her fingers in a perfect rhythm of point-counterpoint against the thrusting of both of their hips.

Oh bloody hell.

They were disintegrating again as he approached his second climax, though this time they were both lost in his sensations instead of hers. He could feel Clara with him, reveling in the oh-so-different fullness that the Doctor experienced with his physiology, he could feel her effortless submission suffusing him and allowing his every cell to relax to the profound invasion of this part of the binding, and his mind was utterly gone to him - he no longer knew if he was on top or bottom, if he was penetrating or being penetrating, if he was the Doctor or if he was Clara or if they were both gone entirely, dissolved into the wild energy matrix that they'd built together out of their promises.

And  _click_ , the loudest yet, the binding around them shoving them higher one more time, and the Doctor felt as if his orgasm was never, ever going to end, and then he finally began to realize that it  _had_  ended and this was just what it felt like now.

Oh hell.

He rolled Clara off of him, pulling free of her body, both of them panting wildly. They eyeballed each other briefly, tearing free of the few remainders of their clothing before they crashed back together on their knees in the moss. The binding had grown so powerful that the momentary lack of skin contact did nothing to disrupt it.

The Doctor nearly tackled her, wrapping one strong arm around her waist and throwing her onto the ground on her back, situating himself between her legs one more time. He leaned forward and put one large hand on her stomach as if to hold her there, and with the other he reached over to the other side to where his jacket had been discarded and fished his screwdriver from the inside pocket.

 _It's time_.

It didn't matter which of them thought it.

He cast about quickly and also recovered the cord from their handfasting. This next part wasn't strictly necessary, but given the nature of their attraction, he knew it would be best this way. Clara just held out her hands to him, wrists together, and he bound them swiftly and tightly before throwing them back above her head.

He felt Clara's body relax the moment her wrists were tied together. She strained against the cord, and the utter lack of give in the knots he'd tied were like an embrace that she'd been longing for her entire life, and her thighs fell further open to him in response.

Perfection.

He worked quickly, knowing that both of their bodies, but hers especially, were being pushed hard by the intensity of the binding that they were caught in. They were both covered in a sheen of sweat though the air around them was damp and cool, and he could hear three hearts hammering hard against ribcages.

Her labia were slick and bare. She'd always kept herself shaven, it seemed to be a thing with human women of her day. He'd already tucked the other ring - pale silvery-blue, matching the ring on her finger - into a slot on the sonic, and with a flick and a thought it was half-revealed.

The procedure was fairly straightforward, and the Doctor slid the ring into place against her labia. The sonic was humming lightly, a warm vibration in his hand that obviously made clear to her that the moment had arrived.

She was staring at him, eyes almost black with her blown pupils, limbs twitching, back arched. Her mouth hung open, her lips glistening, the skin of her breasts and torso damp, her nipples puckered prominently. Her hair, once braided, was utterly undone, and strands of it clung to her face and neck.

"Til death us depart, Clara Oswald," he whispered hoarsely.

"Through all the days of time, Doctor," she managed to reply.

The Doctor grinned manically. He couldn't help it. With a sharp intake of breath, almost a triumphant gasp, he used the sonic to release the mechanism holding the ring open, and Clara gave a full-voiced shriek as the metal slid home through her flesh.

He didn't even pause to look at his handiwork. He dropped the sonic - who cared about the sonic right now? - and covered Clara's body with his own, driving his erection back into her instantly. Her knees wrapped around his narrow hips, her ankles locking in the small of his back, her bound arms thrown around his neck, and for once when they started fucking he had no idea who was on top because no part of him could tell the difference between them anymore.

They rolled across the moss, fighting for control, of each other and the glamour and the binding, except that the fight was just because it felt so good and not because it mattered who won, as they were equally caught up in the thing that was driving them anyway.

Time dilated. Time elapsed. Time froze and time passed. The binding clicked, clicked, clicked. No respite, no refractory periods, just driving them endlessly upward no matter how many times they came. Who came? Clara came; the Doctor came. It didn't matter.

The tapestry around them was ablaze, vibrating with energy as if it were about to explode and take both of them and the entire grotto along with it. At some point when the Doctor had rolled onto his back he realized that it was literally visible around them. Then her mouth was on his again and it didn't matter. Her mouth on his mouth, on his cock, on his stomach and biting his wrist and sucking at the hollow of his throat. His fingers everywhere, and hers, filling any hungry cavities that were not already stretched, endlessly probing their way into one another's bodies.

Time dilated. Time elapsed.

The matrix was blinding, now.

He'd heard of this happening, had never seen it.

They both felt it long before they reached it, the culmination of this madness that had gripped them. They worked toward it together, coaxing it out of bodies that had been maximally tapped for untold hours now, driving each other there with nails and thrusting and open-mouthed kisses.

Time dilated. Time elapsed.

Their final, mutual climax was stunning, tearing all shreds of thought from either of them, hurling them into the void together, where everything disintegrated and coalesced in equal measure and the distinction between pleasure and pain was utterly meaningless. He could feel the burning - her rings, both of them, and his on his finger, the sonic beneath them had even gotten caught in the net, and the binding all around them was bursting, flaring, collapsing under its own power like a star going supernova. He could even feel the new life drawn up with them, knew their son would now always be protected by the pledge that they had made to each other.

Time dilated. Time elapsed.

Time dilated. Time elapsed.

Time dilated. And finally, slowly, time began to elapse.

They were curled together, Clara and the Doctor. She was in his lap, but he was clinging to her as much as she was clinging to him, both with wet faces and sore all over, newly adorned. And they were both whimpering, him as much as her, as they rocked together there on the moss by the pool, as they rocked one another - and their son - back to reality. Gently, slowly. Rocking.

" _Asawa_ ," the Doctor said first, cupping her face, gazing down at her in adoration.

"Husband," she responded weakly, smiling up at him.

He grinned then. "Yes. Wife."

They lay together for a long time there, not speaking, not needing to, not even exactly thinking to one another but merely sharing the long afterglow of the ritual that they had invoked here in this solitary place in a galaxy that Clara didn't even know the name of. The Doctor felt the warm Gallifreyan metal on his ring finger and again marveled - as Time Lords and Ladies did not wear  _this sort_  of wedding ring, he had no idea how she'd found it, but again she'd instinctively met him in finding a way to blend the customs of their cultures that made him feel seen and understood and valued. But he didn't even want to ask her yet, didn't want to disturb the calm, warm psychic floating that followed after the violent, consuming storm of their passionate oaths.

He had no idea how long the ceremony had lasted, hours upon end certainly, perhaps even days. Normally his Time Lord biology tracked time in a dozen different ways, but it'd all been disrupted by the force of the binding they'd gotten caught up in. He likewise had no idea how long they lazed together by the pool - systems still rebooting after the massive disruption - but certainly neither of them evinced any hurry to leave this idyllic place.

After a long rest during which Clara occasionally dozed - and perhaps the Doctor did a bit as well - they exchanged a look and, without words, both practically rolled themselves into the cool water of the pool that had formed at the foot of the falls. The glowing, twinkling water splashed onto their shoulders from high overhead, but the flow was light enough that the towering height mostly provided splash and spectacle.

The Doctor swam to Clara and put his hand on her abdomen under the water, closing his eyes and reassuring himself that their son was undisturbed by the incredibly taxing ordeal that his mother had just undergone. Of course the baby was fine - the binding, stunning as it had been, unexpectedly powerful as it had been, was a binding of deep protection and love, unable to harm anything caught in its field. In fact, Clara's flesh had instantly healed around her piercing at the moment that it was done, and the Doctor marveled at how delightful he found that flash of silvery metal between her thighs as she floated through the multi-hued waters of the grotto.

Hardly any words were exchanged as they re-dressed themselves, looking markedly less polished this go-round but still strangely fetching in their fancy clothes and disheveled hair and glowing skin. The Doctor took Clara's hand and began to lead her back up the fissure to the planet's surface, where the TARDIS awaited their return.


End file.
